One man, eight years, nearly 20k cat videos, and not a single viral hit

https://theoutline.com/post/7709/meet-the-man-who-has-spent-the-past-years-making-over-19000-videos-of-himself-feeding-cats

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

190 63 7 years ago

theoutline.com

oblib• 7 years ago

This is really pretty interesting in a web centric sort of way.

I had to share it on FB. Half my "friends" there are cat ladies who'll all appreciate it.

sys_64738• 7 years ago

What utility does the individual gain from his video going ‘viral’?

nathan_f77• 7 years ago

A monetized viral video can earn thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. It could even be tens of thousands of dollars if the video receives millions of views.

xaedes• 7 years ago

Quickly googled for some data, and this is from 2018:

"YouTube shares 55% of its ad revenue with video creators and books an average of $7.60 per 1,000 ad views. That means you get about $4.18 for every 1,000 views of ads shown on your videos."

So you really need a lot to make it worth the extra work

https://myworkfromhomemoney.com/make-money-youtube/

strict9• 7 years ago

Getting noticed. Maybe being briefly remembered.

Most people don't use social media (or further back, blogs) to get paid or gain utility, they want to be noticed for something.

madaxe_again4• 7 years ago

That is the utility value. It’s the primary utility value desired in human experience, even though most don’t grasp it directly, and instead think they want money, or to be a pop star, or to be a footballer, or to own x, y, z - but these are all manifestations of the fear of being forgotten. In fact, many, many people are miserable because they’ve chosen a means that they didn’t actually want, and the ends of fame are never quite what they expected.

Most of what humans do is to be noticed, to be remembered, for posterity.

I find the notion of being forgotten far more liberating.

astrobe_• 7 years ago

So 15 minutes of fame.

chiph2• 7 years ago

I find these to be very Internet 1.0

Back when people posted things just because they wanted to share something they thought other people would find interesting.

craftyguy• 7 years ago

Back when people posted things just because they wanted to share something they thought other people would find interesting.

That's pretty much the entire premise of twitter, instagram, facebook, reddit, 'hacker' 'news', etc today...

madaxe_again4• 7 years ago

No, now people post things for Internet Points - likes and follows, rather than for the joy of sharing - and it shows in the kind of content that is popular. Some folks have optimised the hell out of their Skinner box solutions.

rdiddly5• 7 years ago

Not the entire premise. There's an additional desire or hope for attention and money now. That's the piece that was absent and relatively impossible back then, that is obviously being eschewed by "Cat Man" to the delight of the author.

Edit: and those platforms actively work to "optimize" the former into the latter wherever possible.

pmorais• 7 years ago

Internet 1.0 didn’t have video...

jayd16• 7 years ago

real player buffering intensifies

autokad• 7 years ago

his videos could have some potential as cat ASMR, but he doesnt shut up in them.

rapind• 7 years ago

The word for that is authenticity. Now that everyone's a marketer it's all but disappeared online.

smacktoward• 7 years ago

Authenticity is definitely the key to online success - once you can fake that, you’ve got it made!

rohanprabhu• 7 years ago

Don't know if it is the HN effect or what, but the article says that the channel has 100 subscribers whereas at the moment of writing this comment, the number is around 12.2K.

sysashi• 7 years ago

Not really, I've seen mentions of this channel during this week so it's all been gathered over time.

danso• 7 years ago

How an animal lover’s hobby of recording himself feeding stray cats exemplifies the glory of the anonymous web.

When I saw this subhed, I thought immediately of Robin Seplut, a Youtuber I had never heard about until a month or so ago when Youtube put a 5-year-old video of him into my recs for some reason [0] (I like cat videos, and have clicked on them for years, but this was the first time I've seen one in my recs).

In any case, Seplut has 900K subscribers and dozens of videos of him feeding the 5,000 feral cats in his city. And the videos are a hoot – his most popular video has 46 million views [1].

The guy at the subject of this article seems to have videos with the same kind of appeal. I wonder how much of his obscurity has to do with his videos just not being labeled well?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTZUTvv_1Onm-f-533Hyurw

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfIqLAyNLY8

CM30• 7 years ago

Some of this guy's lack of popularity is down to his videos not being labelled well, but I think most of it is really due to the fact no one's promoting his work at all.

Because nowadays, that's pretty much the only way to succeed in any form of content creation. * Getting people/companies/sites with thousands or millions of viewers to share your work, and using their audience to bootstrap your own.

This guy obviously doesn't have that. So no one's finding his content, even if they'd enjoy watching it.

Or at least he didn't. Since thisa rticle was posted, his channel's gone from about 2000 subscribers to 12,000 subscribers, just like how it'd gone from 100 to 2000 once it was posted on those deep into YouTube style subreddits.

So he's finally getting a following, because people now know he exists and makes videos.

* For 99% of creators anyway. There's always the 1% of people who strike it big from pure luck/timing alone, usually because they managed to catch an upcoming trend before it hit the mainstream.

PopeDotNinja• 7 years ago

> Some of this guy's lack of popularity is down to his videos not being labelled well

I do not envy the life of a struggling content creator. Having to always come up with titles like...

"Man feeds CATNIP to crazy fail dog"

...sounds like a special kind of hell to me.

rikroots2• 7 years ago

but I think most of it is really due to the fact no one's promoting his work at all

Anecdotal evidence time. I write and self-publish my own poetry chapbooks, distributing them (via Smashwords) to places like Apple Books.

Most of the chapbooks will get downloaded from various venues once or twice a month. Except for one chapbook which averages around 10 downloads a day (7ish from Apple Books, the rest from Google Play). Given that the average print run for a traditionally published chapbook of poems is around 400 total, that is a phenomenal rate - especially as I do nothing whatsoever to promote my books.

How did this state of affairs come about? As far as I can work out, soon after I uploaded the chapbook in question Apple decided to "recommend" it for a week or so, which put it on the front page when searching their site for "poetry". And after it made the front page, it just stayed there, bobbing up and down in the top 100.

Why did this happen? I assume they chose to promote it because the chapbook's title is (unintentionally) a bit clickbait-y. Either that, or pure luck.

walshemj• 7 years ago

Its actually mostly about not being labled well (or at all) and being to short, sound qualitys not mega good.

I suspect this is a labour of love by a Cat Otaku, who wasn't concerned with views subs etc.

Most views from yahoo come from being in the recommendations side bar.

ryandrake• 7 years ago

Some of this guy's lack of popularity is down to his videos not being labelled well, but I think most of it is really due to the fact no one's promoting his work at all. Because nowadays, that's pretty much the only way to succeed in any form of content creation. * Getting people/companies/sites with thousands or millions of viewers to share your work, and using their audience to bootstrap your own.

Isn't this one of the reasons for recommendation engines--to surface content that users might like, as opposed to the traditional way where he who spends the most on promotion wins? Why are all these tech companies investing $billions into AI and recommendations if simple payola is still what drives popularity? Whenever an article points out the negative effects of recommendation engines (filter bubbles, etc.), someone always says "Well, AI is better at surfacing long-tail content that would never get promoted." Yet, here we are in 2019 and content creators are still relying on promotion to get views.

cbanek• 7 years ago

I thought immediately of Robin Seplut

Ditto. His videos are great, I've been watching them for a long time. He never says anything other than the now infamous "ksksksksks." But he does at least label his videos so if someone searches for cat, they will find it.

smnplk• 7 years ago

Just look at the titles of his videos, this is #1 reason why he hasn't received a viral hit. Then there is editing, no captions etc...

A2017U1• 7 years ago

He certainly didn't even ask for people to like the video and subscribe.

stackola• 7 years ago

How am I even supposed to know that's a feature on youtube then?

aerialcombat• 7 years ago

Maybe he's just using YouTube as a giant backup machine.

zuminator• 7 years ago

According to the article, the translation of his twitter bio reads, "I live in harmony with the cats who have arrived in the tetra pot of Kashiwahama, Chiba Prefecture."

The cats didn’t arrive in a tetra pot, they live among the tetrapods, which are artificial concrete objects that are ubiquitously placed along the Japanese coastline, ostensibly to prevent coastal erosion, although some have said they are basically government pork projects for the all-powerful construction industry.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2007/07/22/general/tetrapo...

bitwize• 7 years ago

Katamari Damacy calls those things "Breakwater Block".

Havoc3• 7 years ago

ostensibly to prevent coastal erosion

Nothing ostensible about it. They work well to protect harbours. e.g.

https://i.imgur.com/Okxthdq.jpg

Bigger question is why is anyone using the tetra design at all. The dolos one isn't patented and interlocks way better.

https://i.imgur.com/nO6srwI.jpg

Arnavion• 7 years ago

The translation is wrong. "棲み着く" means "live (in a place) for a long time", so "テトラポットに棲み着いた猫たち" is simply "the cats that have been living in the テトラポット since a long time ago". There is no "arrived" about it.

Havoc3• 7 years ago

Going through old vids it seems some received spikes of attention.

...even spikes 4x the one created by this hn post.

12k subscribers...so clearly he's doing something right.

glouwbug• 7 years ago

That's literally less than one subscriber per video

Havoc3• 7 years ago

I guess persistence can pay off :p

pkulak• 7 years ago

I wonder if he's just using YouTube like Dropbox and just wants to have a personal diary of something he enjoys.

dwaltrip• 7 years ago

Cat Man is actually named Mr. Niiyama. He’s 52 years old, and he’s based in the Chiba Prefecture, about an hour east of Tokyo. Niiyama feeds the cats on the quay near his home, almost every day. “I will distribute breakfast at seven a.m. every morning,” he said. “We distribute over 360 days a year.” He started filming the videos because, as he explains, “I wanted to see the life of a cat.”
Currently, he tends to seven cats, but he estimates over the years he has taken care of 50. Why does he do it? “Because taking care of cats leads to your own happiness.”

There is something very beautiful and serene about this. He found a way of interacting positively with his environment, and has simply stuck with it.

vinay427• 7 years ago

How an animal lover’s hobby of recording himself feeding stray cats exemplifies the glory of the anonymous web.

There's nothing in this article to indicate being an animal lover. Cat lover, maybe...

briandear• 7 years ago

What is up with the website? I felt like a <blink> tag was just a JS scroll away. Can we also drop the gosh-damned animations for text articles and just make it load quickly? What a mess. Some designer out there actually thinks they are clever when instead I didn’t even read the first paragraph.

One man, eight years, nearly 20k cat videos, and not a single viral hit

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