WHY ARE CAT PHOTOS A HIT ON THE INTERNET?

Sites of buzz and humor, news, forums, YouTube, social networks… Our friends chats are definitely everywhere on the web, in the form of photos, videos, animated GIF or “memes”.

As an integral part of the geek culture for a decade, these animals arouse the craze of Internet users from 7 to 77 years around the world. But how can we explain such success? Discover the stars cats of the web and the history of this phenomenon.

Cats on the web: some figures

According to the BBC, two million videos of cats would be hosted by YouTube and represent 26 billion views alone! CNN estimates that 6.5 billion images of cats circulate on the Net and 15% of total traffic would be related to media exchanges around this animal. In 2017, no less than 36 million people watched the feats of Fatso, the pianist cat, on YouTube, and Maru was the most-watched animal with 325 million views at the time.

Funny cats, a fashion that does not date from yesterday

The amusing pictures of animals, disguised or staged in humorous pictures, were already popular in the nineteenth century and cats held a privileged place in 1870, the photographer Harry Pointer has included humanized tomcats, riding a bicycle or riding mini horses.

In 1905, Harry Whittier Frees immortalized at a party the cat of the house decked out with a paper headdress before declining the concept under a series of postcards to success where dogs and cats disguised. These paintings were an international success and the photographer even published children’s books presenting animals staged and humanized on the same principle: kittens sitting, dogs dressed standing, etc. In the late nineteenth century, Thomas Edison introduced cats to the movies, making a splash with his short film The Boxing Cats (1894) which showed tomcats fighting in a ring!

Cats on the web: history of a phenomenon

The invasion of cats on the web dates from the late 1990s, with the democratization of Internet access for the general public. The appearance of the famous “Lolcats” on political forums and blogs in the 2000s contributed to this Internet myth, quickly becoming popular throughout Europe. These images of felines accompanied by a simple humorous legend appear as an extension of the work started by Harry Pointer and Thomas Edison in the nineteenth century.

But the concept was pushed even further by Internet users, since the Lolcat movement even gave birth to a specialized jargon, the “Kitty pidgin” (Creole kitten), characterized by its orthographic deformations and supposed to transcribe the thoughts of animals staged. Very quickly, because of the scale and the speed of diffusion that allows the web, the cats continued to invade the Web with videos (cf the famous “Funny Cats”) and contributed largely to the birth of the same Internet, a mass phenomenon relayed by social networks.

The most popular cats on the web

Thus, cats have spread like wildfire on the Internet in the space of barely twenty years and today constitute an important part of the web culture. But who are the stars cats of the Net?

Grumpy Cat is arguably the best known of Internet users with his scowl that has inspired many memes. Maru, a Japanese cat who first appeared on YouTube in 2008, has generated a craze and now accounts for more than 365 million views and no less than 600,000 subscribers on its official channel.

Lil Bub, a little cat with a tongue hanging, has cracked more than 230 000 users since 2011. Colonel Meow, huge tomcat with impressive physique and serious and authoritarian look, also included in the Guinness Book to be the longest fur cat, also gathers thousands of fans on Instagram. We can also mention Nala, with big mesmerizing blue eyes, Venus the charming turtle shell with two-tone face and minnow eyes, and Hamilton the mustachioed hipster cat.