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from the more-reason-for-cats-to-hate-you dept.
Cats on the internet are over. Done. "Cheezburgers" are off the menu. Play yourself out, Keyboard Cat.
While in years past we've perhaps welcomed the charming cynicism of the likes of Grumpy Cat, it seems people of the internet are now, in stranger times, longing instead for the unconditional and unwavering love of dogs - and I [the BBC's Dave Lee] have the highly subjective data to prove it.
[...] Socialbakers is a company that monitors social media for trends and stats relating to things that are most popular. I got in touch with them about this, and within hours they came back to me with the goods.
For starters, the runaway champion of most popular animal on Facebook is a dog named Boo. He's got more than 17.5m likes, more than double that of his closest competitor, Grumpy Cat.
In third place, Nyan Cat - who isn't even a real cat, for crying out loud.
On Instagram, fine, I'll admit, the top celebrity is a cat. But 2nd, 3rd and 4th place? All dogs. All good dogs.
When it comes to searches on Google, dogs .
But more significant was the historic moment on 3 January 2016, when, for the first time, the term "cute dogs" overtook "funny cats" in global searches.
[...] You could say there's plenty of data out there to suggest that I'm wrong, and that cats are still very much in control. And you'd be right - I found plenty evidence which completely disproves the theory I've outlined here, but I've left it out as I don't care.
There was one piece from Gizmodo in 2015 that suggested there were scientific reasons to why cat memes were more popular online - but to that I say WRONG. Fake meows.
For my part, I tend to prefer pictures of Lego figures or stick people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @03:27PM
Most of what you'd read or feel is Marketing, not Science. As in the nicely humorous introduction, this is an area of biases where being a dog person or a cat person (or an animal-in-general person) most likely has strong reinforcement. Either way.
The measure I'd use? Animal Planet. How much do they broadcast puppies vs. kitties in the Too Cute series and their other programming where there are definable identical programs but dog and cat are separate? My feel last time I looked was that it was equal but they'd run blocks. Because if advertising was slanting dog, I'd expect them to run more dog than cat programming. And vice versa. And advertising money goes where the eyeballs are. (Then again, you might have hidden biases e.g. cats requiring more veterinary care - maybe.)
Reminds me of the comic strip I saw once. The dog reflects, "They [people] feed me, pick up after me and take care of my every need. They must be God." The cat reflects, "They [people] feed me, pick up after me and take care of my every need. *I* must be God." Ba dump bump. Curtain.