Sunday, May 23, 2010

Slippery Kittens

Ever since I was in middle school, I always set my internet homepage to Yahoo!. I picked this up from Jesse, my brother, because he would always read the Yahoo! news and play the free games. All through high school I would read news reports through Yahoo! and keep up with sports through the site. I used to read all their news stories that made it on the front page and then dig around on the actual news page.

So it's weird these days to open my internet browser and the first, biggest headline (including picture and video link) that I see is:

SLIPPERY KITTENS PLAY ON A SLIDE.

And next to it are three video links entitled:

  • Dog can't go up slide
  • Bunny's hiding place
  • Dog learns new word

I mean, this is a website that gets hundreds of millions of hits per day and hosts billions of visitors per year. This is the one thing above all else that they choose to grab people's attention? It's not that I'm disappointed in Yahoo! Clearly, they've calculated what is the best way to get people looking at their site. It's just...I'm not sure what this says about humanity. One of the biggest information/interaction hubs in the entire world bets that a video of slippery kittens is the surest way to attract mass attention. God save us all.

No comments:

Post a Comment