by Elton Gahr

Created on: August 25, 2010   Last Updated: August 31, 2010

If you've spent any time on the internet then you have seen the LOLcats. There are websites filled with with them as well as email that appears randomly in your email, appearances in email and in a dozen other places in the Internet but the question is, why? There is nothing all that difficult or impressive about creating a LOLcat picture and many of them are not all that funny yet it has not appeared to slow down much at all.

The first step in understanding the popularity of LOLcats is to look at the origin of this Internet meme. The true origin of this isn't entirely clear but it was popularized through 4chan. Many of the most popular memes begin in 4chan and so people often go there to look for new ideas so something which is popular there has a far better chance of spreading across the Internet than at a smaller site. This only explains the ability of people to see it though.

The second reason that they are popular is that kittens and cats are cute and this gives people a chance to put up pictures of their own cats. It is also important to point out that a large number of the LOLcats images would be at least a little bit entertaining without the pictures.

The third of these is the flexibility of LOLcats. The truth is that a LOLcat is simply a picture of a cat along with a poorly spelled caption. This means that you can create a LOLcat picture from almost any picture of a cat, as well as for almost any subject. The two of these means that there are hundreds of different ways to create a LOLcat image.

The ability to have such flexibility creates the third reasons that LOLcats are so popular and that is that there are so many of them. With hundreds if not thousands of captioned images of cats a vast majority of them can not be all that funny and there will still be enough of them that are worth looking at that people are going to pass them around allowing the best to move to the top. This is something that is difficult for a video or other types of meme to keep up with.

Because of all of these reasons the odds are good that LOLcats are going to stick around for quite a while simply because you can do almost anything with them and cats are always going to be cute.

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