Cat Video Seen One Million Times
by Michael
(London, UK)
The million views reached 29th January 2011.
How do you make a video that will be seen one million times? I should know, I did it with Kathrin Stucki. In the internet world we are bombarded with very large numbers. We are used to hearing huge numbers such as the 500 million Facebook subscribers. The internet world is a world of millions. We become accustomed to this big number world.
The YouTube video world, though, is littered with millions of disappointed video creators. It is worth realising that only about one in 10,000 videos uploaded to YouTube get 100,000 views after a month. 100,000 views is exceptional. It is very hard to get 10,000 views let alone one million.
The first point to be aware of is that time is useful. I guess that is obvious. My video (one of 70 odd) has been on the internet for over a year. It gets seen about 3,000 times per day, currently (Jan 2011).
What, then makes a great cat video? Or what makes this cat video special?
These are the elements that have come together to make this video so successful:
- The content has got to be unique ideally. And interesting. In this case the cat, Magic, is a truly exceptional cat; the tallest pet cat in the world per the Guinness World Records. Magic (a perfect name, incidentally) is an F1 (first filial) Savannah cat. She is half serval and half domestic cat. Then there is the Calvin & Hobbes (a syndicated daily comic strip) style relationship with Andreas the handsome son of Martin and Kathrin Stucki who provided the excellent video material. It all adds up to a unique and warm visual experience.
- The video material was filmed by Kathrin. She made video material with great potential. I edited it and added the music. I am not an experienced video editor. I used basic software on this occasion, Windows Movie Maker, a free piece of software. I selected some copyright free music and fitted the video into the length of the piece of music selected. I did this to give it a complete and rounded feel. The music is either liked or disliked by the way! The editing was such that I wanted a mini-story to be told. The ending is the cat looking to the future, looking out of the room towards the light and Andreas is at her side. The video builds to that point.
- The vide should be short. People have short attention spans on the internet. Two minutes is fine. You will notice in video statistics provided by YouTube that the majority of viewers fail to view to the end of the video!
I made the video to promote PoC and A1 Savannahs, Martin and Kathrin’s cattery. It has. Thank you Martin & Kathrin Stucki of A1 Savannahs. I felt that this milestone had to be marked and celebrated in a small way. I hope you can tolerate the slightly boastful nature of this article.
