If you have a busy social (media) life, then you’re likely to post about your dog at least six times a week — at least if you’re the average pet owner and a recent survey by Bark and Bones is correct. You’re also much more likely to pull out your phone to take a photo of your dog than yourself and around ten percent of your dogs also have their own social media channels.
Of course, your dog may not be as Internet famous as some others — although people do actually make a living from their pets’ accounts on social media. According to a Wall Street Journal piece about The Dog Agency, popular dogs on Instagram, for example, can rake in thousands of dollars for each product placement photo they post.
Just keep in mind that there are a few tips and tricks to making your dog Internet famous, and most of them start with learning how to take the perfect dog photo.
Now, maybe you don’t want your dog to become famous but you do want to stay in touch when you’re not at home. Depending on age group, up to 23% of pet owners have communicated with their dogs on Skype or Facetime, whether it’s just been to watch them from work or to reassure them while on vacation. And yes, there are instructions on how to do it with your dogs.
Speaking of the Internet, while the impression may be that cats rule, statistics don’t necessarily bear that out. In the latest year with animal videos in YouTube’s Most Viewed (surprisingly, it was 2014), 20% of the most watched were dog videos with nary a cat in sight. Dogs also slightly edge out cats in a Google fight.
Looking at the Bark Box survey, though this makes sense — pet owners watch dog videos or look at dog pictures half as often per week as they post something about their own, but even those numbers can add up. Typically, YouTube viewers watch 3.25 billion hours of video per month. That’s over 370,750 years of video in thirty days, or 51 and a half days’ worth of video per second, every second.
Even a tiny percentage of that is a lot of dog video so don’t worry. You’re not going to break the Internet with your dog photos — although, if you do, your dog may join the rarified ranks of the most viral dog videos of the year!
