Nyan Cat:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4‎

The Nyan Cat became popular through the YouTube clip called Nyan Cat [Original]. The video is an 8-bit animated cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart body, flying through space and leaving a trail of rainbow behind itself, with a Japanese pop song in the background singing nyan continuously. It was uploaded on the YouTube-channel of saraj00n on April 5^th 2011. Picture source: http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/Nyan_Cat_Wide.jpg

Description of the meme:

The animation was made by Christopher Torres from Dallas, Texas. Two different people had asked him to draw a combination of a Pop-Tart and a cat, and this GIF was the result. He posted it without any music on his webpage April 2^nd 2011, and called it the Pop Tart Cat. "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" is the Japanese song played in the background of the video on YouTube. The Japanese word 'nyan' means the same as the English word 'meow', imitating the call of a cat. The song used in the video is a remix of a Japanese pop-song, with female vocals singing nyan throughout the song.

Popularity of the meme:

It was ranked at #5 on the list of most viewed videos on YouTube in 2011, and by the end of April 2011 it had 7.2 million views. As of November 2013 it has reached over 100 million views. Due to it's popularity, a lot of remixes, games, animations, and lots of other stuff have been made with the now iconic Pop Tart Cat or Nyan Cat. The popularity of the cat with the rainbow trail was enormous, and I tried to do the Google Trend search, but my computer did not manage to do that.

Slipknot’s Psychosocial Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mtOdT9LBOg

Viewers of the Nyan Cat video was encouraged by xDaZJMx on the comment feed to view the Nyan Cat song in the background with Slipknot’s Psychosocial video played on mute. This resulted in over 111,000 comments on the Slipknot’s video reading “NYANNYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYA.” To much confusion among the listeners of Slipknot, and it spread the meme even further. The two were put together in a YouTube video on April 17^th and has now more than half a million hits.

Single-Serving sites: http://www.nyan.cat/

This website was published on April 13^th of 2011. The nyan.cat website was originally a fake, but is now controlled by Christopher Torres and shows the real version of the 8-bit GIF animations of the cat. This is a page that shows how many seconds you have been on it, and creates a game where you can share the seconds with your friends. The sharing with friends adds to the hype and generates more users.

Games:

There are a wide range of different games connected to the Nyan Cat animation, according to knowyourmeme.com, there are games “such as Nyan Cat Lost in Space, Snake Nyan Cat, Nyanicorn (Robot Unicorn Attack variant), and Nyan Cat Fly, among others.” These are mostly 8-bit-styled games who are simple to play. Picture source: http://games.mochiads.com/c/g/nyan-cat-fly/screen4.jpg

Nyan Cat Progress Bar:

On June 16^th of 2011, YouTube created a customized progress bar showing the animated Nyan Cat moving across the progress bar and leaving a rainbow trail.