FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Why Did a Video of a Girl with Her Cat on a Treadmill Get 5.6 Million Views?

This internet thing makes no sense.

I just don't get the Internet sometimes. The New York Times's stunning "Snow Fall" interactive feature, which took an incredible amount of development work from a team of people, not to mention the killer reporting, editing, and photography that the piece entailed, racked up more than 3.5 million views, which is absolutely deserved. And seriously, if that sounds like a lot, that's because it absolutely is. It's mind-blowing success for a single feature.

But then I found the video above, which has racked up 5.6 million views in the last month. All that took was a woman with a video camera lightly jogging on her treadmill with her cat, which was then published by user DecentFunTV, which boasts all of three videos on his or her channel, with content disparate enough (the treadmill woman is speaking in a foreign language, while the bacon dog video features an American man) to suggest the DecentFunTV had nothing to do with the production of said videos.

Now, a YouTube search for "cat treadmill" shows that said combination of video subjects is a proven performer, with a whole buttload of videos with hundreds of thousands and millions of views. But this mysterious video, with all kinds of compression artifacts and zero production value, has blown the doors off the rest of the genre. Now, are they all just fake views, like the 2 billion YouTube stripped from Universal and Sony? Hell if I know. I do know, if we're comparing "Snow Fall" and "Girl with her cat on the treadmill," which one I'd be prouder of. Still, how the hell did the video do so…OH WAIT, the cat falls off the treadmill and GETS BACK ON. What a triumph of perseverance! It's brilliant!

@derektmead