In this documentary, Chris Choi reports on the pet owners turning their animals into so-called influencers, cashing in on a booming billion-pound industry where some cats, dogs and birds are now out-earning their humans and making hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. Chris meets the pets and their owners striking it rich, and asks whether it could be a career anyone could do, or is it harder than it sounds?
Bruno the cross-breed Dalmatian is a true wags-to-riches story.
A stray from Spain, he was eventually rehomed in the UK - but his new owners had problems getting him to respond to commands.
In desperation, they even learned Spanish to talk to him - but that didn’t help.
When he didn’t react to a pan falling behind him, they realised Bruno was deaf.
They started using sign language and posted a video about it.
His owner, Skye Tibbetts, told ITV’s Tonight programme: “I just uploaded it, his very first video, then we went for a walk."
By the time they returned, it had thousands of views.
"We didn’t realise it would be a big deal… I went, 'darling, I think this might be going viral'."
Since then, he’s got 14,000 TikTok followers and a £1,000 deal to promote dog food.
Skye says this is a sideline where care must always come before cash.
"Bruno, even before we started doing content, he was the centre of our world," she told us.
"He was the ring-bearer at our wedding, and our life was sort of built around him. So content creation is just capturing that.”
We have been inside the lucrative world of the UK’s social media pet stars.
Some are viewed hundreds of millions of times, earning enough to help pay owners’ bills.
Recent research of thousands of animal owners suggests more than a quarter have set up an account for their pets. It’s a global trend, with the biggest pet stars now attracting payments up to £30,000 a post.
Our furry friends are a surging digital market anticipated to be worth almost £3 billion globally by 2033.
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