Cat

2006image macroclassic

Cats fill an outsized share of the internet in the form of image macros, YouTube clips, single-topic blogs, and named feline celebrities. From Usenet's rec.pets.cats FAQ in 1992 to LOLcats, Caturday, and the Walker Art Center's 2012 cat video festival, cat content shaped how viral image sharing works.

catsearly internet memesimage macro memescheezburger network memes

Overview

Cats are small domesticated carnivorous mammals whose photos and videos take up an outsized share of internet attention. From captioned kitten pictures to YouTube compilations, cat content built up through the mid-2000s until major outlets like Salon started openly asking why the web was so fixated on them1. The pattern spans everything from LOLcats and Caturday threads on 4chan to prestige video screenings at modern art museums5.

Recognizable forms include image macros with intentionally misspelled English (LOLcats), reaction shots of specific pet cats, YouTube clips of household antics, and character-driven feline celebrities like Maru and Nyan Cat3. Cat content spread from image boards and chan forums to single-topic blogs, then Tumblr and Reddit, giving cats a bigger online footprint than any other pet species4. The New York Times' Ideas blog once floated the theory that cats dominate the web because there is a heavy overlap between cat people and internet pioneers2.

How It Spread

The turning point came around 2006. LOLcats and Caturday, the tradition of posting captioned cat images to 4chan on Saturdays, took hold on Something Awful and 4chan at roughly the same time YouTube launched, and I Can Has Cheezburger opened in early 2007 to push captioned cats out of image boards and into everyday web traffic. Urban Dictionary logged its earliest Caturday definition on October 24, 2006.

By 2009, mainstream publications were treating online cats as a legitimate subject. Salon ran "The Internet is Made of Cats" that February, arguing cats' skittish, unpredictable nature made them ideal spontaneous camcorder comics in a way Hollywood-trained dogs never were. The New York Times' Ideas blog echoed the argument, casting cats as perfect for YouTube spontaneity. Mashable followed in 2010 with "Why does the web love cats?" and quoted KYM co-founder Elspeth Rountree pointing back to Harry Pointer's captioned cat cartes de visite in the 1870s as a pre-internet precedent.

BBC's Future column returned to the question in early 2012, casting lolcats as the near-numberless offspring of the "image macro" format that pairs cute animal images with misspelled captions. In June 2012, Google researchers led by Andrew Ng and Jeff Dean published an unsupervised deep learning paper in which their 16,000-processor neural network taught itself to identify cats from thumbnails pulled from ten million YouTube videos. That August the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis hosted the Internet Cat Video Film Festival on Open Field, screening 70 curated clips drawn from roughly 10,000 submissions across comedy, documentary, animated, and foreign categories. People's Choice finalists included Maru, NONONONO Cat, Kitten Hugging Mom Cat, Henri, Dubstep Cat, Nyan Cat, and the Talking Cats.

How to Use This Meme

The umbrella of "cats on the internet" isn't a single template but a set of habits that people mix and match. Common conventions include: captioning a cat photo in LOLspeak (the intentionally misspelled kitten-voice style behind "I can has cheezburger?"), posting cat photos to Saturday threads on chan boards for Caturday, running a single-topic blog dedicated to one specific cat or one specific cat behavior, and sharing short pet clips repeatedly enough that a specific feline becomes a named celebrity like Maru or Henri. The BBC identified the underlying format as the image macro, in which text is superimposed on a photograph, which is the mechanical part most cat memes share.

Cultural Impact

Cat content pulled in serious attention from journalists and academics alike. Mashable's 2010 investigation collected industry commentary, with CatPaint iPhone app developer Cory Alder rejecting a pure-cuteness explanation as oversimplified. A 2010 University of Texas at Austin study found roughly 42 percent of Americans self-identified as "dog people" versus only 12 percent as "cat people," which made the web's cat preference more striking, not less. The Walker Art Center effectively legitimized the format at a fine-arts venue in 2012 with its curated Internet Cat Video Film Festival, which drew coverage from BBC, CBS, ABC, the Huffington Post, and others.

Fun Facts

- Google's cat-recognizing neural network in 2012 used 16,000 processors and more than a billion connections, and it beat a list of 20,000 other objects at self-identification

- Walker Art Center curators picked the 2012 festival's 70 videos from roughly 10,000 submissions

- Harry Pointer was captioning cat photos on cartes de visite in the 1870s, well before the word "meme" existed

- A 2011 Bitly data analysis of its own search results actually found dogs beat cats in sharing volume, despite the web's cat reputation

- The rec.pets.cats FAQ was written in 1992 and released online in four parts over nearly three years

Derivatives & Variations

LOLcats and I Can Has Cheezburger, captioned kitten photos in "lolspeak" that broke into mainstream web traffic from early 2007[6]

Caturday, the Saturday LOLcat posting tradition originating on 4chan in the mid-2000s[8]

Nyan Cat, an animated pop-tart cat character featured as a People's Choice finalist at the Walker festival[5]

Maru, the Japanese box-loving cat, one of the People's Choice finalists in 2012[5]

Infinite Cat Project, the chain of cats looking at cats running since 2004[7]

Keyboard Cat, the piano-playing cat clip cited by the Walker Art Center as a shared festival favorite[5]

Henri, the melancholic French-narrated cat and Walker festival finalist[5]

Frequently Asked Questions

Cat

2006image macroclassic

Cats fill an outsized share of the internet in the form of image macros, YouTube clips, single-topic blogs, and named feline celebrities. From Usenet's rec.pets.cats FAQ in 1992 to LOLcats, Caturday, and the Walker Art Center's 2012 cat video festival, cat content shaped how viral image sharing works.

cats early internet memes image macro memes cheezburger network memes

Overview

Cats are small domesticated carnivorous mammals whose photos and videos take up an outsized share of internet attention. From captioned kitten pictures to YouTube compilations, cat content built up through the mid-2000s until major outlets like Salon started openly asking why the web was so fixated on them. The pattern spans everything from LOLcats and Caturday threads on 4chan to prestige video screenings at modern art museums.

Recognizable forms include image macros with intentionally misspelled English (LOLcats), reaction shots of specific pet cats, YouTube clips of household antics, and character-driven feline celebrities like Maru and Nyan Cat. Cat content spread from image boards and chan forums to single-topic blogs, then Tumblr and Reddit, giving cats a bigger online footprint than any other pet species. The New York Times' Ideas blog once floated the theory that cats dominate the web because there is a heavy overlap between cat people and internet pioneers.

How It Spread

The turning point came around 2006. LOLcats and Caturday, the tradition of posting captioned cat images to 4chan on Saturdays, took hold on Something Awful and 4chan at roughly the same time YouTube launched, and I Can Has Cheezburger opened in early 2007 to push captioned cats out of image boards and into everyday web traffic. Urban Dictionary logged its earliest Caturday definition on October 24, 2006.

By 2009, mainstream publications were treating online cats as a legitimate subject. Salon ran "The Internet is Made of Cats" that February, arguing cats' skittish, unpredictable nature made them ideal spontaneous camcorder comics in a way Hollywood-trained dogs never were. The New York Times' Ideas blog echoed the argument, casting cats as perfect for YouTube spontaneity. Mashable followed in 2010 with "Why does the web love cats?" and quoted KYM co-founder Elspeth Rountree pointing back to Harry Pointer's captioned cat cartes de visite in the 1870s as a pre-internet precedent.

BBC's Future column returned to the question in early 2012, casting lolcats as the near-numberless offspring of the "image macro" format that pairs cute animal images with misspelled captions. In June 2012, Google researchers led by Andrew Ng and Jeff Dean published an unsupervised deep learning paper in which their 16,000-processor neural network taught itself to identify cats from thumbnails pulled from ten million YouTube videos. That August the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis hosted the Internet Cat Video Film Festival on Open Field, screening 70 curated clips drawn from roughly 10,000 submissions across comedy, documentary, animated, and foreign categories. People's Choice finalists included Maru, NONONONO Cat, Kitten Hugging Mom Cat, Henri, Dubstep Cat, Nyan Cat, and the Talking Cats.

How to Use This Meme

The umbrella of "cats on the internet" isn't a single template but a set of habits that people mix and match. Common conventions include: captioning a cat photo in LOLspeak (the intentionally misspelled kitten-voice style behind "I can has cheezburger?"), posting cat photos to Saturday threads on chan boards for Caturday, running a single-topic blog dedicated to one specific cat or one specific cat behavior, and sharing short pet clips repeatedly enough that a specific feline becomes a named celebrity like Maru or Henri. The BBC identified the underlying format as the image macro, in which text is superimposed on a photograph, which is the mechanical part most cat memes share.

Cultural Impact

Cat content pulled in serious attention from journalists and academics alike. Mashable's 2010 investigation collected industry commentary, with CatPaint iPhone app developer Cory Alder rejecting a pure-cuteness explanation as oversimplified. A 2010 University of Texas at Austin study found roughly 42 percent of Americans self-identified as "dog people" versus only 12 percent as "cat people," which made the web's cat preference more striking, not less. The Walker Art Center effectively legitimized the format at a fine-arts venue in 2012 with its curated Internet Cat Video Film Festival, which drew coverage from BBC, CBS, ABC, the Huffington Post, and others.

Fun Facts

- Google's cat-recognizing neural network in 2012 used 16,000 processors and more than a billion connections, and it beat a list of 20,000 other objects at self-identification

- Walker Art Center curators picked the 2012 festival's 70 videos from roughly 10,000 submissions

- Harry Pointer was captioning cat photos on cartes de visite in the 1870s, well before the word "meme" existed

- A 2011 Bitly data analysis of its own search results actually found dogs beat cats in sharing volume, despite the web's cat reputation

- The rec.pets.cats FAQ was written in 1992 and released online in four parts over nearly three years

Derivatives & Variations

LOLcats and I Can Has Cheezburger, captioned kitten photos in "lolspeak" that broke into mainstream web traffic from early 2007[6]

Caturday, the Saturday LOLcat posting tradition originating on 4chan in the mid-2000s[8]

Nyan Cat, an animated pop-tart cat character featured as a People's Choice finalist at the Walker festival[5]

Maru, the Japanese box-loving cat, one of the People's Choice finalists in 2012[5]

Infinite Cat Project, the chain of cats looking at cats running since 2004[7]

Keyboard Cat, the piano-playing cat clip cited by the Walker Art Center as a shared festival favorite[5]

Henri, the melancholic French-narrated cat and Walker festival finalist[5]

Frequently Asked Questions