Behaviour

The Internet's Most Famous Cats: A History of Viral Felines

· 6 min

Before influencers, before viral videos, the internet belonged to cats. Here's how a handful of felines accidentally became global icons.

The internet didn't make cats popular. Cats were already the most common pet in the world. What the internet did was give cats — and their owners — an unprecedented platform, and it turned out that the rest of humanity was very keen to watch. From grainy early-2000s forum images to billion-view YouTube videos to Instagram accounts with more followers than most celebrities, the cat's conquest of the internet has been total, consistent, and completely logical once you understand why.

Why Cats Work So Well Online

Psychologists who study internet content have a few theories. Cats are unpredictable in a way dogs aren't — you never quite know what a cat will do next, which makes short clips inherently watchable. Their expressions are ambiguous; humans project complex emotions onto feline faces, generating discussion and debate. And there's a strong element of parasocial reward: watching a cat be content, comfortable, or ridiculous produces the same mild positive affect as physical contact with an animal, without requiring one to own a cat.

In short, cats are involuntarily good at the internet.

LOLcats: Where It Started (2006–2007)

The first mass wave of cat content wasn't video — it was image macros. "LOLcats" were photographs of cats overlaid with deliberately misspelled, grammatically broken captions ("I Can Has Cheezburger?", "Ceiling Cat Is Watching You"). The format spread on image boards and forums in 2006 and became one of the first true internet memes in the modern sense.

Orange tabby cat with wide eyes — the archetypal LOLcat expression
The wide-eyed, slightly baffled tabby expression became the visual shorthand of early cat internet culture

What LOLcats demonstrated — long before "content strategy" was a phrase — was that cats generated engagement effortlessly. The website I Can Has Cheezburger launched in January 2007 and within a year was receiving 1.5 million page views per day.

Keyboard Cat (2009)

The original Keyboard Cat footage was shot in 1984 by Charlie Schmidt, who dressed his cat Fatso in a shirt and filmed it appearing to play an upbeat keyboard melody. The footage sat unreleased for two decades until Schmidt uploaded it to YouTube in 2007. It became a viral sensation in 2009 when the "Play him off, Keyboard Cat" format took hold — video clips of fails and embarrassing moments were edited to cut to Keyboard Cat as a musical closer. At its peak, the format was applied to everything from sports bloopers to political gaffes.

The original Keyboard Cat footage — filmed in 1984, viral in 2009, iconic forever

Nyan Cat (2011)

On 5 April 2011, a YouTube user uploaded an animation of a grey cat with a Pop-Tart body flying through space leaving a rainbow trail, set to a looped Japanese pop song. Within 24 hours it had millions of views. Within a week it was inescapable. "Nyan Cat" became the fourth most viewed YouTube video of 2011 and remained a cultural reference point for years — the original video has accumulated hundreds of millions of views.

The original Nyan Cat upload — one of the most-watched videos of 2011 and a permanent fixture of internet history

What's notable about Nyan Cat isn't just the view count — it's that the cat in question (the real cat behind the animation) was creator Chris Torres's own cat, named Marty. A grey domestic shorthair from Texas became one of the most recognised cats on earth.

Grumpy Cat (2012–2019)

In September 2012, a Reddit user posted a photo of their cat with an unusually downturned expression. The cat — whose real name was Tardar Sauce — had feline dwarfism and an underbite that produced her characteristic permanent scowl. Within hours the image had been captioned and shared thousands of times. Within months, Grumpy Cat had a manager, a book deal, a movie, a line of merchandise, and had appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Grumpy Cat — Tardar Sauce — with her characteristic scowling expression
Tardar Sauce — "Grumpy Cat" — whose expression was caused by feline dwarfism and an underbite
Lil Bub, the famous internet cat with a permanently extended tongue
Lil Bub — a cat with multiple genetic mutations whose disability became the foundation of a charitable empire

Tardar Sauce's owner Tabatha Bundesen estimated that Grumpy Cat's brand earned over $100 million during the cat's lifetime. Grumpy Cat passed away in May 2019 at age seven. The internet grieved publicly.

Lil Bub (2011–2019)

Lil Bub was discovered as the smallest and most unusual kitten in a feral litter in rural Indiana in 2011. She had multiple genetic mutations: extra toes on every paw (polydactyly), an extremely short lower jaw that left her tongue permanently extended, no teeth (making her tongue protrude further), and a form of dwarfism that kept her permanently kitten-sized. Her owner Mike Bridavsky began posting her photos partly as a personal record; the internet found them irresistible.

What distinguished Lil Bub's fame was its direction. Bridavsky channelled it into advocacy: over her lifetime, Lil Bub's brand raised more than $700,000 for special-needs animal rescues. Bub passed away in December 2019. Her documentary, Lil Bub & Friendz, won the Tribeca Film Festival's audience award in 2013.

The Lesson of Famous Cats

Every one of these cats became famous accidentally. None of them was trained for performance, groomed for stardom, or selected for conventionally appealing qualities. Grumpy Cat looked unhappy. Lil Bub had disabilities. Keyboard Cat was filmed on a home camcorder forty years before its moment arrived. Nyan Cat was someone's dead pet animated into a Pop-Tart.

The internet doesn't reward cats for being what humans think cats should be. It rewards cats for being exactly, specifically, unapologetically themselves. Which is, when you think about it, what cats have always done anyway.

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