>cats turned the internet into the faggotry it is todayThe New York Times described cat images as "that essential building block of the Internet".[11] In addition, 2,594,329 cat images had been manually annotated in
flickr.com by users.[12] An interesting phenomenon is that many photograph owners tag their house cats as "tiger".[13]
Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami started the website I Can Haz Cheezburger in 2007, where they shared funny pictures of cats. This site allowed users to create LOLcat memes by placing writing on top of pictures of their cats. This site now has more than 100 million views per month and has "created a whole new form of internet speak".[7] In 2009, the humour site Urlesque deemed September 9 "A Day Without Cats Online", and had over 40 blogs and websites agree to "[ban] cats from their pages for at least 24 hours".[14] As of 2015, there are over 2 million cat videos on YouTube alone, and cats are one of the most searched keywords on the Internet.[7] CNN estimated that in 2015 there could be around 6.5 billion cat pictures on the Internet.[15] The Internet has been described as a "virtual cat park, a social space for cat lovers in the same way that dog lovers congregate at a dog park".[16] The Daily Telegraph deemed Nyan Cat the most popular Internet cat,[17] while NPR gave this title to Grumpy Cat.[18] The Daily Telegraph also deemed the best cat video on YouTube as "Surprised Kitty (Original)", which currently has over 75 million views.[19] Buzzfeed deemed Cattycake the most important cat of 2010.[20]
In 2015, an exhibition called "How Cats Took Over The Internet" opened at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.[21] The exhibition "looks at the history of how they rose to internet fame, and why people like them so much".[7]
