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A day at work for Mark Wardle can include accompanying cats to Hollywood film sets or high-end magazine shoots. As an “animal talent booker and fur whisperer” (a title that makes me immediately regret my own career path) Wardle manages about 60 pets, many of them cats, at the pet influencer agency Urban Paws.
His is not a unique job. In the UK and beyond, pet influencer agencies – including one devoted to cats, Feline Stars – have begun to proliferate. The reason, Wardle notes, is simple: many of these animals now have “more reach and followers” than their human counterparts, with enough clout to land primetime TV spots. It is, after all, an industry riding the wave of a global pet economy projected to surpass $500bn by 2030.
The most famous cat influencer is Nala, who was propelled to stardom by virtue of being extremely cute and cross-eyed. In 2020, she secured the Guinness World Record for having the most followers for a cat on Instagram, currently 4.4 million, and now she has her own premium cat food brand, Love, Nala. Others include Don’t Stop Meowing at 2.8 million Instagram followers and Venus the Two Face Cat at 2.2 million.
These sizeable followings are also translating into cold, hard cash. Wardle tells me pet influencers with more than 200,000 followers can earn between £2,000 and £3,000 a post and £10,000 for a campaign, comprising three or four pieces of content. Accounts with millions of followers can demand “tens of thousands”, with a minimum fee of £15,000. More people than you’d expect, he adds, have now abandoned their day jobs to manage their cats’ careers, estimating you need about 200,000 followers to do so.
Frankly, Wardle had me at £2,000 a post. Turning to the family cat, Olly, I no longer saw a pet, but my first serious investment portfolio. Surely, it can’t be that difficult to make him into a social media star? I begin hatching a plan to turn him into the next Nala, using tips and tricks from the experts. Seven days seems feasible in the golden age of viral content. Hopefully at least one of us will get a pension fund out of it.
To maximise Olly’s chances of becoming a cat influencer, I approach Niki, who runs the Instagram account Lady Lola and her Boys (336,000 followers), documenting the lives of her 20-year-old cat, Lola, and her two adopted siblings, Teddy and George. She began posting at the start of 2024 for a more noble reason than mine: she craved a creative outlet outside her demanding corporate job.
One of Niki’s first posts – asking social media users to follow Lola, then 18 years old, instead of preternaturally adorable kittens – resulted in 10,000 followers overnight. Since then, Niki has grown her cats’ following on Instagram by focusing exclusively on “gentle” content of them sleeping, playing with catnip toys and being groomed. A simple, short clip of Lola sunbathing in the garden, intended as a dopamine hit for those having a “bad day”, received more than 83,000 likes.
Niki assures me it is possible to moonlight as a cat influencer. She films and edits in her spare time, “I can put together content really quickly”. Though she has supplemented her income with brand deals, on TikTok, where she has 22,900 followers, she earns “pennies”, while Instagram offers no compensation for UK creators.
Still, I’d be happy to secure a brand deal for Olly, so I take Niki’s advice on board. I do have some serious limitations, though: Olly, according to my mother, is “indolent and not photogenic”.
Niki, however, protests at Olly’s shortcomings and instead offers three clear USPs: he’s black, a senior and a rescue cat. She claims if I wholeheartedly lean into his “branding” my bold goal of turning him into a cat influencer in just seven days isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds.
Day one
Niki recommends filming cats in their natural habitat, and this, for Olly, is an Amazon box. Hardly the makings of internet stardom, surely? But Niki insists her fanbase was built on content that’s “not snazzy, not flashy and not funny”, which very much suits me.
I decide to try a trend, believing it will be a shortcut to fulfil the criteria. Lately, cats being shuffled around to Ace Hood’s Bugatti have been racking up millions of views. One feline star, My Name is Kurama, earned 2.2m views and more than 115,000 likes for her take on the trend: being dragged around in a box while wearing a wide-brimmed sunhat. So, I recreate the same video with Olly, minus the sunhat.
The results are underwhelming. A few hundred pity views at best. Maybe it is the lack of a sunhat. Or maybe, as Niki suspects, following a trend is the wrong strategy. Of her 400-plus videos, she estimates only five have been based on trends.
Day two
Will carving a clear niche help Olly’s prospects? Wardle thinks so. “There are fashion cats, beauty cats and food cats, as well as just general lifestyle and travel,” he tells me. Inspired, I plot Olly’s reinvention as a cat fitness influencer – a move that certainly paid off for fellow black cat, Oliver Goose, otherwise known as the “treadmill cat”. One video of his morning run racked up a staggering 23.4m views. He’s even appeared on The Kelly Clarkson Show.
The catch: Olly has yet to grasp the concept of “movement” as a verb, let alone go near a treadmill. But he is very good at everyone’s favourite yoga pose, savasana (lying on your back with your arms and legs relaxed). As Olly settles onto the yoga mat, I hit record and post the footage on TikTok. The views are as low as his cardiovascular rate.
Day three
In search of inspiration, I scroll through social media and discover Merv the Cat. Once a stray in LA – found in an abandoned theme park, covered in ants and drinking detergent – she is now an internet sensation, with 2.6m TikTok followers, her own range of plush toys and Hollywood representation. “I can proudly say I met my cat’s agent in Beverly Hills,” her owner Chad Jamian, an actor, tells me over Zoom. “I’ve never even met my own agent there, I don’t think.”
Merv’s account is absurdist humour. Some of her most-watched videos feature a romance with Jamian’s perpetually shirtless gardener, Charles, or showcase her talent for unleashing demonic meows. Regrettably lacking a hot gardener of my own, I film Olly meowing, adding what I think are “witty” captions, casting him as a petulant aristocrat demanding boxes. When it fails to set social media alight, Jamian’s earlier advice echoes back: “Put your ego aside”.
Day four
In the morning, Olly collapses to the floor with theatrical abandon, and I know exactly how he feels. His small act of resignation, however, sparks an idea. “You can’t predict the weird things that people connect to,” Wardle reminds me. “Plus, it should be a fun hobby; you’re not trying to work your cat to death.”
Could Olly’s “flop” be our breakthrough? After all, others have built entire followings out of a single quirk – much of Organic Nature Channel’s 146,000-strong audience is devoted to nothing more than his two cats loafing. Emboldened, I post Olly’s second flop of the day. The post flops. I flop. Olly yawns.
Day five
Sometimes, simplicity is best, so I return to Niki’s advice. “What I wanted to create was just a bit of happiness,” she says. “People worry about being absolutely perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. If it’s too polished, it’s too polished.” Niki’s two most popular TikToks? Short clips celebrating Lola’s 19th and 20th birthdays – nothing fancy, just joy.
I hate to admit it, but I have no idea when Olly’s birthday is. Yet I do at least feel happy when Olly comes racing towards me as I step out of the car after a day in town. I like to think he misses me, although perhaps he’s just annoyed I’ve forgotten his birthday again. The subsequent clip I post to social media performs mildly better than my previous attempts. Still no brand deal, though.
Day six
On a quiet Friday, I improbably spend my evening “rebranding” Olly. I have not fully embraced Niki’s advice, and the consequences are evident. After a quick audit, she recommends I change the account’s name and reminds me of Olly’s USPs, which I have so far neglected.
It works, sort of. Olly – no longer “The Average Cat” but “The Black Senior Rescue Cat” – receives his first-ever TikTok comment. “Olly, you are a very handsome boy,” one user writes. I don’t tell Olly, though: I’m scared he’ll want to replace me with a Beverly Hills cat agent.
Day seven
Now I’ve found an audience – albeit fledgling – the key, Niki advises, is to keep posting similar content. “You need a style and to be consistent with the style, because your audience will expect that,” she says.
Taking this to heart, I post another video of Olly running enthusiastically towards me (this time in the garden) and, to really hammer home his USPs, I write a caption urging people not to overlook black senior rescue cats. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it becomes Olly’s most successful video to date, amassing more than 1,000 views. It feels like a win, even though it is small fry for social media.
By the end of the seven days, Olly has fewer followers than my nextdoor neighbour, at 106 on TikTok and 15 on Instagram, one of whom is his vet. I am mostly to blame, as usual. Niki tells me she “thrives” on making content. I do not.
Though money and internet fame are within reach for cat influencers, there are downsides, too. Now that he has millions of followers, Jamian tells me Merv’s account can be “less fun and more difficult” to manage. “Throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks is no longer a thing [when you have a following],” he says. “Now you’re like, oh man, I’ve gotta get these one, two or three things that people are really loving to get those big numbers.”
Even in the seemingly innocuous world of cat influencing, trolls pervade. Jamian reveals he’s conscious of how he holds Merv on camera out of fear of being called “a bad cat dad”. “The internet will be the internet no matter what,” he sighs. “And you have to be ready for that. You cannot please everyone.”
The threat of trolls, coupled with the demands of running a cat-influencing empire, are enough for me to leave Olly’s social media accounts lying dormant. As I realise this, he rolls over on the floor next to me, apparently in agreement. My online ineptitude – unimproved, even with the help of experts – may have destroyed Olly’s last shot at fame and fortune. But as he saunters over to his Amazon box and settles in I suspect he’s much happier than he would be on a film set or magazine shoot, anyway.
