Editor's introduction: In modern society, pets occupy a unique position in people's hearts, which has derived a lot of new consumption of pets. This article will discuss cute pet content, analyzing the deep reasons why people love to consume animal content, and the problems to pay attention to when creating such content.
Ever since humans domesticated animals such as dogs and cats 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, domestic pets have become a classic theme in images and artworks, and have played an important role in culture, society and communication. In modern society, people's love for pets has been extended through the Internet, and the creation, consumption and sharing of related content have become more smooth and convenient.
According to relevant data, on YouTube, the popularity of pet videos is second only to entertainment, tutorials and technology videos. [1]
In China, many head UGC video platforms also have no shortage of animal zones or special labels. In some comedy TV shows in the early years, videos showing animals showing trouble or high intelligence are really eye-catching tools, and in the past year, with the disappearance of the big stomach king, animal eating and broadcasting has become more and more popular, filling a market gap.
This issue of the all-media faction discusses cute content as the theme, trying to analyze the deep reasons why people love to consume animal content, and the problems that should be avoided in the creation of such content at present.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" >, the characteristics of online pet content: meme transmission and emotional sustenance</h1>
Whether it is the groundhog howling "ghost animal" material on station B, or the online cat sucking cat known as the confusing behavior award, when it comes to animal content consumption, it can first be divided into two categories according to functional attributes.
The first type of content is often symbolic in its dissemination, which can provide consumers with reproduced texts and guide them to free collage; the second type is pure cute daily life, bringing consumers the most direct healing and joy.
The first category begins with the Keyboard Cat, which swept the Internet in its early years.
On a cold afternoon in 1984, American Charlie Schmidt was spending time in his apartment, his beloved orange cat "Fat Man" sleeping on an electronic keyboard, bored and bored, he began to shoot videos with two friends. When it was Charlie's turn, he suddenly glanced at the sky-blue baby shirt next to the orange cat—"I quickly put it on her... So she woke up. Charlie later wrote in the book, "I suddenly wanted to make a song for her." After recording an impromptu melody, Charlie puts the fat man in a shirt and helps her to the keyboard to record the "meaningless" moment. [2]
Keyboard cat videos aren't Charlie's only creations, and over the next dozen years he recorded hundreds of quirky and unique art videos — though they were of "very poor quality."
In 2007, Charlie uploaded a keyboard cat video on YouTube, and two years later, independent video producer Brad approached Charlie and connected "Keyboard Cat" with another botched video under the slogan "play him off, keyboard cat."
After dissemination and fermentation, the "keyboard cat" has gradually become a symbol and a mature network meme for consumers to carry out secondary meaning production. In the early days, the core intention of people's reproduction was mainly to mock the clumsiness and antics of others with the help of this content: for example, for people who deliberately made ugly eyeballs, pretentious award speeches, and so on.
"Keyboard Cat" original video. Image source: Youtube
On New Year's Day 2014, "Keyboard Cat" appeared in the MV of Miley Cyrus' new song Wrecking Ball, appearing on the big screen in New York's Times Square as a New Year's guest. Represented by the "keyboard cat", many animal network memes that have been infiltrated with the meaning of ridicule for many years have laid a solid mass foundation in European and American culture, and have constantly sprouted new symbolic connotations and group attitudes.
The second type of content is based on the daily life of cute pets, with the purpose of creating pet "human design", deriving various multimedia forms of content to provide consumers with emotional motivation and sustenance.
In this category, the most common is pet funny videos, and in recent years, the most representative content is pet eating broadcast. In September 2018, the owner of Samoyed Maya uploaded a video of her eating watermelon on YouTube – a video that quickly set off the #dog asmr# trend, exceeding 1 million views, and countless people were deeply attracted by Maya's hair, demeanor and chewing sound.
In such videos, the content creator will amplify the chewing sound and demeanor of the pet several times, and the hearing and vision will stimulate the brain to secrete dopamine at the same time, bringing a great sense of security and pleasure to the viewer.
Samoyed Maya's eating broadcast. Image source: Youtube
Pet eating broadcast is also very popular on domestic short video platforms now, in addition to domestic pets, there are also many people who fall in love with watching panda eating broadcast.
Image source: Weishi @ Xinhua News Agency
Whether feeding pets or national treasures, people rarely appear in such videos. When the entire video is always focused on the animal, the audience will be more easily brought into the context of the content, which greatly extends the possibility of consumption.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > two, in addition to cute, cute pet content what else? </h1>
Contemporary young people have little resistance to pet content. Any behavior such as spoiling, tantrums, stupidity, eating, etc., may be sought after. Japanese Shiba Inu Kabosu has become popular on Chinese social networks for his innocent demeanor...
In reality, people may not feel close and cute when they encounter pets, but once they are on the Internet, they seem to fall into an unconditional fascination with pet content. So, in addition to cuteness, what magic does this content have in cultural dissemination?
First of all, pet content, as the carrier of "cute culture", meets the needs of young subculture circles.
"Cute culture" has the characteristics of variability, marginality and mobility of youth subcultures,[3] which are embodied in the content of pets, and often present the distinctive characteristics of rebelling against tradition and advocating freedom.
"Born" in 1982, "Garfield" is based on the red tabby exotic shorthair cat, showing the cat's "cute expression" and also being given a highly anthropomorphic social life. This grafting subverts the mainstream culture and is deeply loved by Western youth.
Similarly, today's pet content provides a broader imagination for the audience through a variety of media tools, which combine consumption and reproduction to convey self-emotion and achieve individual expression.
For example, giving cat P tears represents recognition and grievance; giving dog P leather jacket sunglasses represents cool, these are the most common uses at present, these pet content is often more easily accepted than direct text expression, and it is more able to convey emotions.
In this context, the desire for animals ceases to be a desire for the animals themselves, but becomes an obsession with the symbols represented by the animals.
Secondly, rooted in the fertile soil of new media, pet content continues to optimize the communication effect with the help of media characteristics, and behind a click and play, there may be a complete industrial chain.
As a convenient identity construction channel, the filling of pet content on short video platforms and social platforms meets the dual needs of producers: the confirmation of personal identity and the commercial value of social identity exchange.
The cute pet video incentive program launched by the video platform
Pet short video influencers such as "Talking Liu Erdou" and "Golden Retriever Egg Yolk" all have distinct personalities - this "human design" is more or less mixed with commercial considerations, and the pet owner's own identity will play an influence in the whole process of "human design polishing".
Under the question of "how to operate a pet account", many respondents gave answers such as "Kuaishou dog love, B station cat love, douyin user compatibility is higher", etc., which shows that using pet content to earn commercial benefits is getting more people's favor.
I know that there are many questions about the operation of pet accounts. Image source: Zhihu
Third, watching pet content has practical significance for regulating audience emotions.
Jensica Gall Myrick, a professor at Penn State University, initiated a study that analyzed a range of behavioral traits of nearly 7,000 netizens while watching cat videos. Using emotion management theory, Jessica argues that "regulating emotions" can be attributed to respondents' primary motivation for consuming cat videos.
Specifically, in the theoretical system of emotion management, media use is seen as a form of emotion regulation. Media users are not entirely conscious of their choice of media, but are influenced by the excitement potential, absorption potential, semantic affinity and hedonic value to choose the media for consumption.
In the digital age, humorous and cute pet videos provide audiences with a ready-made way to regulate their emotional state, and pet owners/pet lovers will take the initiative to consume such content because of the high semantic affinity of cute pet videos.
Finally, pet memes on social media have become popular and are also attributed to the diversity of the culture itself, which makes pet content more fresh.
In Japan, for example, the sudden popularity of the surprise cat in 2010 reflects the cat's historical place in Japan: It has been pointed out that the surprise cat's facial features resemble the Japanese cultural bakeneko, an anthropomorphic spiritual guide symbolizing good luck and special abilities. [5]
In Latin America, the protagonist of the indigenous animal alpaca is accompanied by "Ola K Ase" (short for Hola qué hace, Spanish for "what are you doing"). Based on the Latin American domestication of alpacas, combined with the realistic context, the alpaca pictures here are given a meaning of contempt and ridicule.
One of the reasons why many popular animal content stand out from the ocean of content in the first place is that it has specific cultural factors and is therefore different. People from other cultural circles often have a sense of curiosity and freshness for such pictures or videos, which in turn promotes the memesis of content.
A special magic of animal content is that people don't need to know what "Ola K Ase" means, but such a "unconscious" sentence with an alpaca expression is enough to attract netizens in different places to process it for secondary dissemination.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > third, behind the strong demand for cute pet content, be wary of creative flavor</h1>
When traffic is growing in the pet content market, it is often necessary to pay attention to avoid being wrapped up in business and traffic without restraint and bottom line.
Last year, there were media reports that a number of domestic online shopping platforms quietly rose to pet live blind boxes: the price of blind boxes ranged from more than a dozen yuan to thousands of yuan, and after the buyers and sellers reached a transaction on the platform, the seller would randomly pack the pets and send them out, and the buyers could only know the breed of small animals when unpacking the box - so as to achieve the "surprise" and "excitement" of opening the blind box in the ordinary context.
Media reported on pet blind boxes. Image source: Weibo @ Sichuan Observation
The randomness of "unpacking" exposes the buyer's disregard for life and completely alienates animals into commodities, which is undoubtedly the extreme embodiment of consumer society.
Similarly, in the midst of a juggling pet content, this will actually comes into play — no matter how deformed the content is, it always catches some attention at the beginning of creation.
Therefore, or to pet eat broadcast as an example, feeding snails to eat snail lion powder, forcing dogs to "storm inhale" raw meat, in order to present "cute" cats to overweight and other content all appeared, causing some controversy, can not shoot the big stomach king video with people as the protagonist, began to create an animal big stomach king, in fact, it is also a deformed creative thinking in the traffic trap, which will obviously only destroy the atmosphere of the content field and trigger more people's rejection.
In the era of "cloud pet sucking", all kinds of pet content represented by cute pet short videos in China have formed a considerable consumption scale, and since 2020, there have been continuous analysis articles proposing that cute pet short videos will become the next outlet for emotional consumption.
According to a report by Kuaishou, as of May 2020, Kuaishou has a pet live broadcast every 5.4 seconds, with more than 100 million viewers. [6] It is undeniable that Cute Pet has become one of the traffic tools of short video platforms and e-commerce platforms.
It is precisely for this reason that while fully understanding the needs and interests of users, standardizing the creation of pet content and forming a benign pet content dissemination ecology will contribute to the long-term development of this content field.
Reference Links:
Myrick, J.G. (2015) Emotion Regulation,Procrastination, and Watching Cat Videos Online: Who Watches Internet Cats,Why, and to What Effect? Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 168-176. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.06.001)
Mashable. (2020). The legend of KeyboardCat: How a man and his cat(s) won the internet lottery. (https://mashable.com/article/keyboard-cat-history)
LI Shuai. A Study on "Meng Culture" from the Perspective of Youth Subculture[D].Nanjing Normal University,2016.]
Myrick, J.G. (2015) Emotion Regulation,Procrastination, and Watching Cat Videos Online: Who Watches Internet Cats,Why, and to WhatEffect? Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 168-176. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.06.001)
Miltner, K. (2018). Internetmemes. In J. BurgessA. Marwick, & T. Poell The sage handbook of socialmedia (pp. 412-428). SAGE Publications Ltd,(https://www.doi.org/10.4135/9781473984066.n23)
Xinhua Net: 4.38 million people watch online internet celebrity Xiaoxiang Pig to see how cute pet short videos have spawned a new economy. (https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1681671056365852303)
Author: Dori; Public Account: Quanmeipai (ID: quanmeipai)
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