LOLcats and other Close-Up Animals With a Wide-Angle Lens

While I like to try to be as globally applicable as possible in a blog about targeting things to specific audiences, I’d be doing the niche revolution a disservice if I didn’t at least make mention of LOLcats.

What’s a LOLcat you ask? For those of you too lazy to click on the link, it’s a term taken from the unique hybrid of ‘LOL’ (Laughing Out Loud for the one of you who doesn’t have IM) and ‘cat’. So essentially, a funny picture of a cat – with an intentionally misspelled caption. Browsing the top Google result for the search LOLcat, I Can Has Cheezburger dot com will quickly illustrate that contributors of these funny cats have a very specific set of rules and a strong sense of unity all their own. If you’re wondering where you’ve heard that before, its because that is essentially a definition of a community. Or, for our purposes, an extremely targeted niche audience – something that the folks at Purina should really be drooling over…
Browsing this site quickly made me recall the South Park episode ‘Quest for Ratings’, from Season 8 where the boys’ show was consistently beat in the ratings by Craig’s shows – ‘Close-Up Animals With a Wide-Angle Lens’ and ‘Close-Up Animals With a Wide-Angle Lens Wearing Hats’, respectively. While doing so in a mocking tone, the episode pointed out something which is key to the thesis of this post – some people actually really love this stuff!!!

The best part is, LOLcats and Close-Up Animals Wearing Hats are really what the future of media and content is all about – communities evolving and growing around content which interests them, engages them and unites them. In many cases, this highly niche content, as in this example, is actually created by the community themselves. This is the kind of loyalty that the media giants with their ‘360 content strategies’ are lusting for in the online space and praying they’ll be able to achieve before their bottom line drops out from under them. The scary thing for these media giants that LOLcats illustrates, is that in our DIY web world, people are going to find content that entertains them, because if they can’t – it’s just as easy for them to entertain themselves.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to pitch a new show idea to the CBC… now where did I put my wide angle lens….

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