Tiny Hamster

Submission 9,889

Part of a series on Hamsters. [View Related Entries]

About

Tiny Hamster is a cute animal web series on YouTube featuring a hamster or other small rodent performing human-like activities in an elaborately constructed miniature environment, like a hamster-sized dining room, all shot in high-resolution and often at a close-up angle.

Origin

The first Tiny Hamster video, titled "Tiny Hamster Eating Tiny Burritos (Ep. 1)" was uploaded by the YouTube account HelloDenizen,^[1] run by the social media marketing agency Denizen,^[2] on April 29th, 2014. As of July 2nd, 2015, the video has received over 10.6 million views.

Spread

The initial tiny hamster video was posted on Reddit in /r/videos the same day it was uploaded to YouTube, where it received 4,917 points (95% upvoted).^[9] From there, it was written about in the Huffington Post, Gizmodo, New York Daily News and many other news outlets.^[3]^[4]^[5] Later that year, the video won the Webby Award for best viral video, and to celebrate, the hamster ate tiny Webby Awards.

Other users began creating videos of their hamsters enjoying human-like environments. The account April's Animals created some popular ones, including "Tiny Hamster in a Tiny Mansion,"(below, top left) which received over 2.3 million views between July 2014 and July 2015.^[7] A current search for the terms "Tiny Hamster" returns more than 43,600 videos on YouTube, although many of them are users uploading videos of their small hamsters, and not hamsters filmed in elaborate environments.^[8]