Tumblr Tuesday: Meet the man behind “Animals Being Dicks”

Welcome to our first Tumblr Tuesday, where every Tuesday we celebrate our love of Tumblr. Tumblr, a New York City based startup, is like the FFFFound for the rest of the world. It’s as shareable and fast-paced as Twitter but populated with more in-depth text and rich images. And that’s reason enough to celebrate.

In addition, as of May 1, 2011, Tumblr included more than 5 billion total posts and over 17.5 million total blogs. In June of 2011, Tumblr surpassed Wordpress in total number of blogs breaking through the 20 million mark. The fact that you can upload content to Tumblr in seconds from your smartphone and that you can allow users to submit their own content, which you can then moderate, means that there are some great creative ways in which you can use Tumblr. Most recently, we stumbled upon Animals Being Dicks, which is a selection of “silly gifs of animals being jerks.”

While lying on my couch last Sunday night, I saved myself from sadness by spending countless hours watching sharks shitting (or ejaculating?) on divers, dogs shitting on their owners and knocking over children. The site currently has over 150,000 Facebook likes and has received over 50 million page views, from over 3 million visitors since June 13th, 2011. I reached out to the site’s creator John Williams to thank him, and to ask him for an interview. So ladies and gents, without further adieu, meet the man behind Animals Being Dicks.

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Age: 31
Location: Atlanta, GA
Profession: Web Designer
Favorite meal of the day: Dinner. Hopefully as much meat as one can pack into a human body.
Favorite black actor: Samuel L. Jackson or Tay Diggs or Cuba Gooding Jr.

CBM: How did the success of Animals Being Dicks begin?

John Williams: I never had any aspirations for the site. It happened out of a fit of boredom. I was alone one weekend, with my wife and kids out of town. I planned to spend most of my time playing LA Noire. But I finished that after a half-hour, so I found this trove of funny gifs on a message board and thought it would be funny to curate them into a site. It started taking off once I added the tweet and Facebook share buttons. It went from like 10 visits the first day to 1000, then 50,000 in the span of a couple days.

CBM: Why GIFs? Why not YouTubes?

JW: The thing that makes gifs great is it condenses the absolute funniest part and loops it over and over. You don’t have all this “dead air” like a lot of YouTube videos. You get the pay-off almost immediately.

CBM: What’s your earliest memory of interacting with animals?

JW: Growing up in rural Georgia, I had many animal encounters. I was probably 3 or so and my mom found a dead squirrel I brought in from outside because I thought it was a stuffed animal. I cried for days when mom threw it in the fireplace.

CBM: Tell me about your current puppies Milo and Lulu? What’s the most dick thing they’ve ever done?

JW: Milo is super chill. He’s a terrier dachshund mix. He doesn’t do anything bad, but he also doesn’t do anything remarkable either. I have a lot of contempt for Lulu. She was a stray we took in. She barks constantly. I’m convinced she is insane with syphilis or something. She also shits when she’s mad. Like if we kick her off the bed because it’s sexy time, she’ll dump one and totally ruin the mood. She also snatched a donut out of my kids hand. She doesn’t even like donuts.

CBM: Do you think the animals are actually dicks, or merely a little…misunderstood?

JW: I do believe there’s an underground movement to be as subversive as possible. People think I’m crazy, but that’s sorta become what the site is all about. Pointing out just how evil animals can be. It’s only going to escalate. A lot of people don’t know this, but the new Planet of the Apes movie is the screen adaptation of my site. True fact.

CBM: What’s your favorite animal being a dick?

JW: I think Prank Dog. There’s a lot going on to appreciate in that one.

CBM: When was your holy shit this is blowing up moment?

JW: When Laughing Squid posted about it and I saw 50,000 visits in one day.

CBM: Now that it has blown up, how are you planning to make that money? Could there be a potential blog to iPad e-book-video-app-social-etc. campaign in your future?

JW: I’ve joked about that with friends. Animals Being Dicks flip books or something. Just what every kid wants to wake up to on Christmas. We’re gonna wallpaper the thing with ads. With our traffic, that should be pretty lucrative. I’m not quitting my day job, but it would be nice to put some cash away for the kids college.

Also, don’t miss:

5 Terrifically Brilliant Uses of Tumblr.

Tumblr’s awesome iPhone app.

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