What Good Cat Videos Should Be Like

Shirley Lee
7 min readAug 3, 2024
This is all we need. Source

(Scroll to the latter part of this post for the good cat videos.)

Good cat videos on the Interwebs should be watched by more people. Creators of great cat videos should be rewarded handsomely.

The world would be a better place with more good cat videos.

There’s a problem though: currently, the most viewed cat videos online are bad cat videos.

When you type “cat video” on the YouTube search bar, three kinds of videos pop up:

Bad Cat Video Type 1 — Too Planned, Too Staged

With 15.5M subscribers, this channel has to be one of the most viewed cat channels on YouTube. And I don’t understand why it’s so popular.

All of their YouTube Shorts are carefully crafted narratives about the channel’s star cat and its caretaker — so carefully crafted that they are all obviously staged.

Even though the videos are packed with plot points, they are language-free, which means anyone can watch regardless of the language they speak. In one of their latest Shorts, there are three to four cuts in literally the first second of the video — watch any “YouTube Viral Video 101” tutorials and you’d know that this editing style is famous for keeping you slightly disoriented and therefore engaged.

--

--

Shirley Lee
Shirley Lee

Written by Shirley Lee

person || @thatshirleylee || subscribe for more updates: buttondown.email/thatshirleylee

No responses yet