The New York Times today has a piece on a web institution: CuteOverload.com (a slice of heaven on your desktop). It gets as many visitors a day as political gossip blog Wonkett not to mention many other sites.
The way the paper has it the site is an antidote to all the web crappiness and nastiness that's out there, but personally all I can see are a bunch of pictures of tiny ducklings and kittens. Oh and today its squirrels. In cars and on skateboards.
Who looks at this stuff? Who are the CuteOverloaders? Meg Frost the a 36-year-old design manager at Apple who started it for one and now presides over 88,000 unique visitors a day. That's a lot and she has plenty of advertisers, but has not given up the day job. She says the site “is like taking a happy pill." She's keen to stress though that it is “cute, but not cutesy" and says the site has an edge. I'm not so sure, but hey.
Frost gets more than 100 pics sent in a day. That will be people with time on their hands and cameras and animals. That is a lot of "ands". People sure love their small fury animals as fans of some of the other sites out there, also with an "edge", such as icanhascheezburger.com, stuffonmycat.com and Kittenwars.com will know. It is a veritible mini industry.
Who knows, maybe people just want a cute new screen saver everyday. And frankly, I can hardly talk as I have this pic on my desktop. Okay I did take, but really what's the difference.
After yesterday's post on PR cancer and Jade Goody, I feel I should make amends. Here is my amends. So go ahead and knock yourself out, get that cute picture on your desktop. You know you want to.
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I love cuteoverload.com. I read the news on the bbc every morning when i start work and the things on there just depress me - at 20, i do feel i should be getting over my cute kitten phase but i couldn't name one other website that makes me as instantly happy as cuteoverload - there should be more sites like this.
Very pink and VERY fluffy but it did make me smile. An edge though? mmmmm
Give me awsomeasianbabes.com any day of the week
Gordon Macmillan
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