Cold War of Cute Cats (or how I stopped worrying and learned to love adorable feline videos)

September 27, 2011

This post was authored by Bailey Johnson of CBSNews.com's The Feed for a YouTube Trends series exploring viral video phenomena.

We live in a brave new world of viral videos. Cute cats, once the sole domain of the U.S. and Japan, have gone global. We see a lot of videos over at The Feed, and we’ve been struck recently by the amount of content coming out of Russia. As with so many other things in the world today, America is losing its competitive edge. We cannot allow a viral video gap!

Seriously though, adorable pets are universal, and it’s great to watch what appears to be a viral renaissance taking place in the Motherland. According to YouTube Trends data, the number of videos on YouTube with the Russian words for 'cat' in the title uploaded in September is already double the number uploaded in September of 2010.

Did you see the incredible Spider Cat? So did 1.1 million other people.



This video is unusual in that the people are actually speaking Russian. (It’s also usual because that cat climbs up a freaking wall, but I digress.) Most of the pet clips we see from the Ruskies hit the viral sweet spot: they’re short, sweet, and (other than the sound of the animal stars) silent. Ignoring the Cyrillic in the titles, you’d never know where these videos came from.



Then again, maybe part of the renaissance is happening on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe those of us in the States are finally taking notice of the Russian phenomenon. This video of a cat having printer problems is similar to another video from 2008 that racked up 2.2 million views.



Whatever the case, it’s always funny seeing cats fall down, I mean, it’s great to see that the things that bind us together (watching cats fall down) outweigh the things that tear us apart. Pretty deep thought for a couple of cute cats, huh?

Bailey Johnson is an editor at CBSNews.com's The Feed. He spends a lot of time watching other people's pets.
Today's Trend analysis provided by

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