According to ReelSEO.com, a website about video marketing, there are more than two million cat videos on YouTube. People have watched these videos more than 25 billion times, which equates to an average of 12,000 views per cat video.
The statistics speak for themselves, but they don’t tell the whole story.
Perhaps it’s because I’m a dog lover with a cat allergy, but the staggering amount of cat media available to internet users came as a surprise to me. With numbers like that, I couldn’t help but wonder: who, exactly, is so drawn to this type of content? And what effects do cat-related media have on viewers?
These were the overarching question that spurred my initial quest to gather empirical data on the internet cat phenomenon. I scoured academic databases to see what the literature could tell me, but found no existing data about why people watched so many cat videos online, or what effects these videos might have on us.
So I decided to find out myself.
My neighborhood internet celebrity feline – the adorable Lil Bub, who happens to also live in Bloomington, Indiana – shared the link on her website after I launched an online survey. With Bub’s help, the survey quickly garnered nearly 7,000 respondents.
