This weekend was a huge event, I am of course talking about the SuPurr Bowl (Think the kitten bowl, but LIVE on Twitch and YouTube) presented by CuteAvalanche and hosted by yours truly.
Point of fact, I was also a producer, videographer, editor, social media manager, and every other hat you can wear under the sun. As with many solopreneur content creators, I took on the role of an entire production company rolling out dozens of pieces of content and created a two-hour live show. All in all, I spent the better half of the last two months culminating in a 48-hour last-dash sprint to get through a very long checklist of items. Many of which I dismissed as no longer important and allowed myself NOT to do them.
They got done anyway, with the exception of maybe two items
It’s always a fun event and while I was pretty stressed from Thursday to Sunday, I will gladly do it again next year.
So How’d it Go?
But here’s the interesting thing, for the past 4 years running this event we’ve seen it grow, see it bring in more donations and then this year even though I promoted more, talked it up more, multi-streamed to 8 new platforms to essentially double my potential audience reach — even partnering with a cat-themed Facebook group with nearly 17K followers as one of our streaming destinations
We had a record-low turnout
We brought just over half the donations we did last year
Clips generated by viewers were almost nothing
So what changed? There’s a lot of speculation here
We scheduled the stream on YouTube and Facebook… maybe too far in advance, maybe not.
We picked a time slot before the main event happened, and not at the same time as the Kitten Bowl (now known as the Great American Rescue Bowl).
Maybe in a year where so many new Twitch competitors came out, we lost an audience who hasn’t found that we are streaming on those platforms.
One viewer during today’s chat brought up a fascinating theory I’ll call the Swiftie effect.
Did Taylor Swift Steal All Our Viewers?
Taylor sure seemed to be a buzz about this event, trending on Twitter, all over the news, everywhere you looked ‘Taylor Swift will be with her bo at the Super Bowl’ or some version of that
And the Venn Diagram of Cat Lover and Swiftie, while un-documented does seem fairly large.
So did we merely lose the audience to those people who would normally “just watch the commercials” attending Super Bowl parties for a quick glimpse of Miss Swift?
We may never know the answer, but next year we are considering moving our SuPurr Bowl Cat event to Saturday just in case Taylor returns to the Super Bowl
You can watch the replay of the 2-hour event, plus some extra hours of kittens having fun (and a lot of cat naps) at
While you’re over there, please give a like and leave a comment as they say.
Hire Me!
If you’re looking for someone to host or produce your next livestreaming event bring me on