The internet is for cats. They are everywhere and they give us delight and make us happy. We love cats, and their media exposure was already strong in the 20th century. But with the rise of the internet the cats transformed into media superstars. The reach millions of people and populate all social media channels. The most popular cats show their presence on youtube and instagram, they post their pictures on facebook and twitter. And recently the new douyin tiktok short video platform creates new cat champions.
The millions of views, likes, and followers show the ongoing impact of cats. When it comes to the cat celebrities, like all time heroes Grumpy Cat and Nala, they are present on all channels. With their Instagram accounts they have millions of followers. But there are not only real cats, the virtual characters like Nyan Cat have also a great outreach. And kitty games on the blockchain got huge investments from big investors like a16z crypto. Even Thomas Edison was filming cats in 1894 - as one in the line of cat lovers and cat photographers. In the 1960s Walter Chandoha was putting cat pictures on their food and took a total of 90,000 photographs of cats during his career. And so he made the cats early stars. But the real explosion of cat pictures and videos started with youtube founder Steve Chen in 2005 posting cat videos on the net.
