My Quest To Get Rich From Viral Cat Videos

by Sarah Stodola

I am what you might call a casual cat-video viewer. There are people out there — I know a lot of them, and I’d wager you do, too — who spend hours plowing through YouTube and Buzzfeed, clicking from one cat video to the next and urging anyone within earshot to watch along with them. While I’m far less enthusiastic than that, if you send me a link to a cat staring down an alligator, or a cat trapping another cat in a box, I will most happily watch and probably even discuss it. I suspect I’m pretty close to the norm: who doesn’t like a good cat video?

So many people like a good cat video, in fact, that the cat video has become a driving force on our Internet, a booming industry unto itself and arguably as big a player as that other industry that also references cats albeit in more euphemistic terms. Unlike with porn, though, this felt like a game I could get in on. Rumor had it that some people are making serious money off their cat films, their cats following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Maru, Stalking Cat and Dramatic Cat. What could be more appealing to a freelance writer with some time on her hands than making piles of money for little effort? And so I set out to make a viral cat video of my own.

While cats have roamed the Internet since the beginning, their financial potential didn’t register with any force until the advent of I Can Has Cheezburger, a site created in 2007 featuring “Lolcats,” those famously cutesy photos of cats accompanied by grammatically endearing captions. The site was purportedly sold less than a year later for $2 million. Today, it features cat videos in addition to the original Lolcats. In its wake, a number of other sites began to capitalize on the frenzy. BuzzFeed, a site that has recently become a major player in viral content creation, is one such entity. Jack Shepherd, the man largely responsible for the cat content there, told me that cats generates 3.5 times more viral traffic (shared via Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.) than the average BuzzFeed post. And they generate a whopping 14 times as many “reactions” (likes/dislikes).

The cat video industry has become so entrenched, it’s even been spoofed, a classic sign of entry into the national consciousness, similar to the first time a politician gets impersonated on “Saturday Night Live.”

When YouTube began a profit-sharing program in December 2007, video uploaders with a proven track record were offered “partner” status, and a share of the revenues from their videos. In 2009, it opened profit-sharing to all users, regardless of past video success, via Google’s AdSense program (Google owns YouTube). Suddenly, there was virtually no barrier to entry for making money off of one’s beloved feline.

Perhaps no single cat has capitalized on the growth of this industry so much as Maru, the pet of Japanese owners whose videos on YouTube have been viewed over 143 million times. That’s nearly the viewership of the Super Bowl and the Oscars combined. And now he has a book, too.

So I set out to make my cat video. This might be a cinch, I thought. It seemed like a project that didn’t require much talent, only a cat. And even though I didn’t own one, I know plenty of people who do. I prevailed on several of them to loan me their cat in the service of journalism and potential superstardom.

EXPERIMENT 1
The first friends to grant me access to their cats were Peter and Gully, English expats with a fine penchant for the absurd. I arrived at their home one evening, bottle of wine in hand as offering. After a glass and a trip to the corner pet store for some catnip, I got to work, while Peter and Gully sat nearby, sipping their own wine, half-ignoring the American chick crawling around their dining-room floor, cooing at their two cats, Schizo and Muffy.

Schizo, the sprightlier, more telegenic of the two, quickly became the focus of my camera’s eye. And she knew it. As would be proven to me over and over again, cats have the wary celebrity’s sixth sense of the presence of a camera, choosing Natalie Portman reserve over Paris Hilton exhibitionism. They might be doing a series of double back flips off the refrigerator, but turn the camera on them and they’ll immediately sit demurely on the floor.

Schizo remained unmoved by the catnip, as well, toying with it with the way Don Draper might fiddle with a poorly made martini. In one hour or so of shooting, I was able to get a collective 13 minutes of footage of her posing and playing. I edited the best of it into a minute-long clip and posted it a couple of days later.

It was a learning experience. For example, while I was working, my hosts had put on an album by some old charming crooner, something I hadn’t thought twice about at the time. But according to YouTube’s terms, even ambient noise that includes copyrighted material renders a video ineligible for their profit-sharing program. Nicer to discover was the breadth and usefulness of YouTube’s editing features, which helped me adjust the video’s lighting, edit the footage down to its best parts and steady the shot post-recording. All welcome enhancements. While the video wouldn’t be eligible for monetization, I posted it anyway, just to get a gauge of the number of hits a cute cat giving a mediocre performance can expect to bring in.

To date, that number is 22. Even the application of alluring SEO best practices in the titling — “Cat Distracted by Camera” — wasn’t enough to draw in the unwitting masses.

Any cat video posted to YouTube faces stiff competition. Currently there are about 2.3 million cat videos on the site;according to a Google rep I spoke with, that’s between eight and nine years’ worth of cat videos. Of course the field was not always so crowded. The first cat video to go viral was posted in 2006. Called simply “Puppy vs. Cat” (solid SEO!), this historic footage captures a cat confronting an entire litter of puppies. “Confronting” in this case is perhaps too generous a word, since nothing happens in the video. The puppies are adorable, and the cat is wary of them. The nonevent has attracted almost 13 million views. That’s as many viewers as for a typical episode of “Two and a Half Men,” a show for which 30-second commercials bring in a quarter-million bucks.

Since those days, standards have gotten higher. During his time at BuzzFeed, Shepherd has gained a nuanced understanding of the elements that can propel a video to the head of the crowded pack: emotional resonance, the element of surprise, a narrative context. Cats doing “people things” and “interspecies” footage do particularly well. “A good piece of cat content often hits all of these notes,” he says.

But you still see the odd viral cat video that thrives despite its seeming mediocrity. Like this one, of an unsurprisingly cute kitten doing not much of anything, has racked up almost 7 million views.

EXPERIMENT 2
Undaunted, I set off for my second film session, this time to the apartment of my friends Tyler and Leigh, who rescued their cat, Luna, on the night of the lunar eclipse in February 2008. The unofficial going rate for use of another’s cat for the night now standardized at one bottle of wine, I again presented one upon entering.

After another fine dinner, we turned our attention to Luna, this time taking care to turn off the background music. At first, she sat unmoving on a dresser in the hallway, eyeing the camera with a mixture of boredom and disdain. But a couple minutes into that first take, she jumped off the pedestal, walked a few steps, and began to stretch, as cats do. Leigh, attuned to the wants and needs of her cat, picked her up, and Luna proceeded to reach to the sky with her front paws. It was adorable. It was also, it seemed to me, kind of a people thing to do — and thus accomplishing one of Shepherd’s “dos” on the checklist for a good viral cat video. I felt the giddy rise of potential. Yes, that’s me giggling off-camera.

I put up the stretching video along with a short clip of Luna doing a sort of aerial flip off of a chair. Both were eligible for YouTube’s profit-sharing program; and this time around, I went so far as to place a dignity-stripping link on my Facebook page. Still, collectively these two videos have made me four cents.

While I hadn’t yet found success, over the course of my research, I spoke to someone who had. In 2007, Jennifer Selke, a summer-camp director living in Berkeley, uploaded a video in which her cat Huey unscrews a jar of treats all on his own, then digs in. To date, it has garnered over13,500 views, a modest hit by YouTube standards, but enough to have captured the attention of the kitty-litter maker Fresh Step, which paid her handsomely (she can’t disclose the precise sum) to feature the video in a commercial. Hers could be called the Justin Bieber path to success.

But a commercial deal isn’t necessary for viral cat fame. Indeed, some might even say it’s old school, old media, antiquated. The revenue potential from YouTube videos is speculative, since YouTube doesn’t divulge numbers and most of those making real money from their videos remain mum on the topic, as well. But estimates suggest that monetized videos bring in anywhere from $1 to $10 per 1,000 views. If your video attracts a million hits, then, you might make anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000. For a viral hit, revenue could easily reach into the six figures.

EXPERIMENT 3
I gave myself one more chance to make it in the viral cat video world. This time I visited the Manhattan studio of Dina and her two cats, Billy and Dora. Once again, I showed up equipped with the requisite catnip and bottle of wine. As with the earlier trial, one cat stood out as the performer: Dora. Dora was bewitched by the catnip, and mostly unfazed by the camera, playing and going generally nuts. Crazy like cats get. But as Shepherd had explained to me, “cats doing cat stuff” is not the way to break out of cat-video anonymity.

Minutes after my camera ran out of memory, Dina brought out a new toy, which inspired Dora to perform some seriously athletic flips. You’ll have to take my word for it that this was the most captivating thing either of the cats did that night.

The thing I chose to post, because I captured it before the camera filled up, featured Dora standing by while Billy, the dominant cat in the household, smother his face with the catnip. Dora sits by, attempting to look disinterested until Billy grows bored of the toy, then she pounces. If anything, I hoped viewers might find this power play between these two cats interesting — a psychological study.

They didn’t.

And thus we come to the inglorious end of my great experiment, where I give grudging respect to those who have captured feline gold on film and walked away the richer, in spirit and in savings account. Maru, Stalking Cat and Dramatic Cat: I tip my hat to you.

THE FINAL TALLY

Total videos: 4
Total minutes of raw footage: 68
Total monetized videos: 3
Money spent on wine: $30
Money made from subsequent videos: 4 cents
Total number of views: 75
Total number of views, monetized videos only: 53
Most successful video: The stretching video, with 44 views

Sarah Stodola is a freelance writer who could probably use a cat. She blogs here and tweets here.

“As for perhaps their most famous song, Bob Sherman recalled how 40 years earlier they were asked to replace a ballad which Julie Andrews had rejected. After two weeks they were still looking when his eight-year-old son came home from school. ‘I said, “How was school?” He said, “Fine. We had our vaccine today.” I said, “Oh, did it hurt?” “Oh no, they just put a drop of medicine on a lump of sugar.” The next day I said, “Dick, what do you think about a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down?”’ The next day they sang it to Walt Disney who was just down the hall in the animation building. He said, ‘Yeah, that’ll work, finish it up.’”
 — Robert Sherman, who has died at the age of 86, co-wrote a large number of songs that are lodged somewhere deep within your psyche. I would list some of them, but I don’t want to be responsible for getting them stuck in your head all day, particularly “It’s A Small World (After All).”

Vintage Drunkenness

What kind of drunk are you going to get tonight? I’m thinking sheep. [Via]

Not long ago, I got a letter from my airline of choice, explaining that they’d partnered with the fine people in the U.S. government to help prevent terrorism faster. If you’ve spotted people at airports being whisked into a special line, where they don’t have to take off their shoes, don’t have to take out their laptops or even remove their belts, you’ve already spotted this program in action. The rollout of TSA PreCheck — branded as TSA Pre✓™ — started just back in October, with seven airports, including Los Angeles and Miami, and just for American and Delta passengers. Then the TSA announced they’d be including JFK airport — which just happened last week — and then O’Hare and Washington National this month. Throughout the year, airports from Honolulu to Tampa will be added.

Now, the airlines were providing test subjects to the feds by including their frequent fliers — but only some of them, chosen by who-knows-what criteria. The invitation process was opaque: you’d get an invitation or you wouldn’t. I checked my American Airlines account, and I wasn’t one of the special elect who’d been “opted in.” But you could also force your way into the program, by having a frequent flier number and registering with one of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Trusted Traveler programs. In a strange fit of annoyance — who likes to be excluded? — I suddenly found myself filling out a lengthy application with the U.S. government. Also, sending them $100 for the privilege.

The Global Entry program just officially became a permanent U.S. government program. It has about 260,000 members. Global Entry is intended for frequent international travelers; it “pre-certifies” people for customs. They get to go to a kiosk and scan their fingerprints in and make their immigration declarations and get ushered through. So far it’s just available at 20 international airports.

Their application wasn’t too invasive: the address of everywhere you’ve worked and lived for the last seven years, some declarations about your lack of criminality, that kind of thing. I’ve never been charged with a crime, so I apparently sailed through and got a letter through the GLOBAL ONLINE ENROLLMENT SYSTEM website: “We are pleased to inform you that your U. S. Customs and Border Protection, Global Entry membership application has been processed and you are now invited to visit an enrollment center to complete the enrollment process.”

Invited! This meant two things, I think. One is that they don’t check, or at least count, your credit score. (I don’t have one.) I am also assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that this means that I am not on the list of reporters that Homeland Security tracks on Facebook and Twitter. Or perhaps I am, and I passed the test.

I made an appointment, and then, when the day came, I got nervous. I put on an adult shirt, with buttons! They referred to this as an “interview,” but I had no idea what they might possibly ask me. I figured it was going to be like the DMV, but as if the DMV was run by the CIA.

The Global Entry office, which is located opposite the “Avianca Airlines” check-in counter in the Miami airport’s international terminal, was a small dark waiting room with a bright room inside it. There was no one in the waiting room. A lone guy waved me into the inner office. I gave him my passport and driver’s license and then started telling him about how I had all this proof of address information (my license has an old address). He did not really care at all about that.

He took my fingerprints with their groovy and frightening scanners, and also took my picture with his little webcam. We talked a little. He asked me when was the last time I’d left the country. I couldn’t remember. I think I went to Canada like 15 years ago? He looked a little surprised — most applicants of course do this so as to blow by customs. I told him I was just doing this for the expedited domestic screenings. We talked about America for a while, and we agreed that you could pretty much get it all right here in the U.S. of A. Why leave? Mountains with snow! Tropical beaches! Big cities! The U.S. has it all! We totally agreed that America was great.

Then he slapped a little white sticker with some initials on the outside back cover of my passport, and then I was suddenly done. (The sticker reads “CBP,” which I assume stands for Customs and Border Protection, and according to the FAQ, “The Global Entry passport sticker identifies you as a Global Entry member to CBP personnel.”) There were no trick questions about whether I’d been a drug mule or anything. After I got home, I got another electronic notice.

We are pleased to inform you that your U. S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Global Entry program membership has been approved. You may use the program as soon as you receive and activate your new Global Entry card.

If you enrolled in Global Entry, you may begin using the kiosk immediately. Global Entry cards are only issued to Global Entry members who are U.S. citizens, Lawful Permanent Residents or Mexican Nationals (who are not current SENTRI members). Global Entry cards are not valid at the Global Entry kiosks.

Global Entry cards… are not valid… at the… Global Entry kiosks.

I spent some time trying to parse that and then decided not to worry about it. I immediately went to the American Airlines site and put my new ID number in the “Customs and Border Protection ID” of my frequent flier profile page. There’s a slot for that — right by the slot for “Redress Number.” A “Redress Number” is a TSA-assigned number for “customers who believe they have been mistakenly matched to a name on the watch list.” There was something so telling about how the airline didn’t even feel a need to explain, or capitalize, “watch list.”

Eventually my card came, and I activated it within 30 days, as per their instructions.

I suppose I had, without even phrasing it aloud, asked and answered a question. Which do I hate more: minor inconvenience? Or an overreaching and intrusive state that divides people into classes based, at best, on one’s ability to pay for entry into the superior class, and, at worst, on one’s ability to pass a government test with no explanation of the criteria?

To be fair, there are criteria, five in all. The first four include that you can be denied if you lie on the application, if you are subject to a pending investigation, and, troublingly, if you “have been convicted of any criminal offense.” (That makes it clear how we’re certifying a “non-criminal class.”) But the fifth is quite broad: applicants may be denied if “they cannot satisfy CBP of their low-risk status or meet other program requirements.” The old catch-all.

Here’s an interesting data point: American Express reimburses their Platinum and Centurion cardholders for the $100 fee.

* * *

“Our security officers here behind us can focus more time on those we know the least about,” is how John Pistole, the chief TSA honcho, explained the program at a press conference at JFK.

“Expanding TSA Pre-Check is about more than just speeding up travel. It’s part of a fundamental shift in how we approach aviation security,” is how his boss, Homeland Security honcho Janet Napolitano, recently put it.

And what a trade-off: the convenience of TSA Pre✓™ isn’t even guaranteed to enrollees. They can still give you the full pat-down at any time, or the special pre-approved screening line can be shut down due to staffing issues. As well, as the TSA put it, “no individual will be guaranteed expedited screening in order to retain a certain element of randomness to prevent terrorists from gaming the system.” So we government-approved fliers can’t even rock it to the airport at the last minute, else they might get hosed, so as to prevent terrorist from gaming the system.

Also, I am pretty sure that if I could go back in time to tell teen-aged me that I was going to willingly sign up for a Homeland Security investigation and stamp of approval, I’d spit in my own face.

The Global Entry card, which is not valid at the Global Entry kiosks (this means, it turns out, just that you must use your passport at the kiosks), came in a thick little paper pouch, white and blue, with a blurry globe with a blurry North America in view. It also had a warning: “Protect your card’s sensitive electronics — and your privacy. Keep the card in this sleeve when not in use.” I wonder if the RFID chip in my new passport will fight with the RFID chip in my Global Entry card. Presumably they’ll conspire to make it extra-easy for any government agency to find me wherever I go. Right now the card and the passport are about 12 feet apart from each other, and I’m right in the middle of them.

Orange monkey babies!

“With faster than human speed, this is a step in the development of a high speed killer that could negotiate a battlefield quickly to hunt and kill. The biggest concern about this is that no artificial intelligence system can distinguish between civilians and enemy combatants, and so if this was operating on its own it would fall foul of the laws of war.”
 — Great! The military has designed robots that can move faster than we can run away from them. Just in case the swarms of quadrotor drones that are coming fail to annihilate us. (I like the part in that video where the robot cheetah trips a little bit on the treadmill. It’s like Bill Murray in Lost In Translation. “Help!”)

In case you missed it, thousands of students from all over the UC system marched on Sacramento yesterday afternoon to protest California’s broken school system, where college tuition has tripled over the last ten years. In the evening, 68 were arrested inside the capitol when they refused to leave.

Gordon Voidwell, “XO Boyfriend”

Five years ago, for my job editing stories for XXL magazine, I would go in to the offices of Harris Publications for a week of afternoons each month. Sometimes when I was there, I would sit next to a young fellow named Will. I’m not sure if Will worked for XXL or one of its sister publications, like Scratch. (I think the former.) And I’m not really sure what he did there, either, other than wear noticeably cool, brightly colored sneakers. I don’t mean this as a criticism — he probably didn’t know what I did there, either, other than wear much less cool, earthtone corduroys — we didn’t talk about work a lot. We talked about other stuff. Music, which Will knew a lot about, and the news stories of the day or whatever. He was a particularly nice guy to talk with. But I wasn’t there that often. And after a few months, maybe half a year, I showed up and Will had disappeared. I never found out where he went. It was just one of those work things, it was a big office. You know. But the other day, this woman I know because our kids are friends at school told me I should check out this singer from the Bronx. This woman is from Minnesota, and she knows I work at a music magazine, and a friend of hers is friends with the singer. “He’s doing good,” she said. “Kinda like Prince.” I looked up his name and learned that he has a new video, and watched it, and, lo and behold, it’s Will!

Who now goes by the name “Gordon Voidwell.” (Kim… + the …’oids + Rock… ?)

I vaguely remember Will telling me he was a musician. But it’s not like he was always handing me flyers to go see his shows. (Like I said, he was nice to talk to.) I remember talking to him about LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver album, which had just come out around the time we sat next to each other, and which we both loved.

Will was born in 1983. And his songs and videos indicate that he was watching the world very closely for the first seven years of his life.

Here’s another one of his songs. This one came out last year. This one is most like Prince, I think. Controversy-era Prince, when he wished we all were nude. (Hahaha. As if Prince ever stopped wishing that!)

And here’s another one, from 2010. This one reminds me most of the Tom Tom Club.

I like them all!

I don’t want to alarm anyone here, but I’ve just learned that Shaquille O’Neal turns 40 today. Which suggests, by the logic of contemporaneity, that those of us who recall his playing days — not even the 19 years in the league, but his time as a student at LSU — are probably not too far away from 40 ourselves, if we have not already reached it. That’s one hell of a shock on a Tuesday morning. I would tell you to sit down, but judging by your advancing years you are probably seated already. Sorry.

“True, no single wavelength of light appears pink. Pink requires a mixture of red and purple light — colors from opposite ends of the visible spectrum. Easy enough to do, and no seeming threat to pink’s ontological status.”
 — Scientific American’s Michael Moyer decries “the absurd war on the color pink.” I didn’t even know there was such a war. But there apparently is. They’re trying to do Cam’ron’s favorite color like Pluto. There’s no “p” in Roy G. Biv, say the haters. Some of them even say that pink should really be called “minus green.”

This all has to do a with stuff that hurts my head think to about, invisible wavelengths and the way our eyes translate them into what we experience as “color.” Luckily, I can get Van’s station when I need rejuvenation.

And if the anti- forces are successful, with all this science that I don’t understand, in demoting pink to Pluto status, at least it won’t be lonely out in space.

But, man, sometimes it’s hard enough at is, when you’re looking at a color wheel, or an array of polo shirts at a New Jersey beach club, with the violets and the fuchsias and the corals and everything, to tell which one’s pink. If they decide to go ahead and turn it into a whole different color entirely, be it red/purple or “minus green” or something else entirely, I won’t know what to do.

This is just one of my very favorite songs in the world ever by anyone, and more people should know about it.