The Kitty
In celebration of World Tiger Day, Friday 29 July 2016, The Clinton Partnership announced the launch of a new online initiative for Save Wild Tigers – “THE KITTY” – a YouTube channel dedicated to cat videos.
Working with our friends at JOY in Sydney, it’s never been easier to help raise funds for Tigers – Every time you watch a cat video via “The Kitty”, a little bit of money goes towards tiger conservation. (You know you were going to watch them anyway)
Collectively, the world watches cat videos hundreds of millions of times each month on YouTube. Save Wild Tigers is harnessing the internet’s obsession with cats, leveraging the platform provided by YouTube to raise money for tiger conservation through ad views.
Cat videos are the online phenomenon of our time, with over 35 billion views to date and counting. When you put this number beside the number of tigers left in the wild, a mere 3,500, it is an alarming reflection on where our priorities lie.
Enlisting pet cats to help big cats is also a way to involve a younger generation that tends to donate less to charity in traditional ways. Today, people would rather support brands that do good rather than donate their hard-earned dollars toward a cause, small change donations have become near obsolete, so charities need to adapt.
THE KITTY gives content makers—which is pretty much everyone with a smartphone—their own platform to collectively do something that will benefit the planet. If all of the cat video views on YouTube so far had raised money for conservation, we could have raised more than £265 million! That’s enough money, in theory, to save tigers from extinction in the wild.
The funds raised by ad views will support Save Wild Tigers campaigns that help reduce demand for tiger products in countries such as China and Vietnam, undercover investigations into the wildlife trade, and lobbying for better regulations.
