The lolcat craze started around 2006. Cats with funny captions started appearing on the (by now infamous) 4chan site.

Wikipedia notes:

Tamara Ikenberg of The News Journal states that “some trace the lolcats back to the site 4chan, which features bizarre cat pictures on Saturdays, or ‘Caturdays’.” Ikenburg adds that the images have been “slinking around the Internet for years under various labels, but they didn’t become a sensation until early 2007 with the advent of icanhascheezburger.com” The first image on “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” was posted on January 11, 2007. The use of “lolcat” to describe the phenomenon was introduced no later than June 14, 2006, when lolcats.com was registered. Lev Grossman of Time wrote that the oldest known example “probably dates to 2006″, but later corrected himself in a blog post where he recapitulated the anecdotal evidence readers had sent him, placing the origin of “Caturday” and many of the images now known as “lolcats” in early 2005.

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