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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Simon’s cat, his sister’s dog and the RSPCA

December 19, 2008

Simon’s Cat is an extremely popular animated series created by Simon Tofield. Since releasing his first short film via YouTube at the start of the year, searches for ‘simons cat’ have shot up, peaking in July when a new episode was released.

On December 8th Tofield released another new episode, but this time it was about his sister’s dog rather than his cat. ‘Simon’s Sister’s Dog – Fed Up’ was created for the RSPCA to highlight the problems of pet obesity, and the YouTube page included a link to the charity’s Give Animals a Voice website. As the chart below illustrates, traffic to the site increased significantly as a result, peaking on December 11th.

UK_internet_traffic_to_RSPCA_give_animals_a_chance_website_2008_chart.png

As you can see from the chart below, there have been a number of day’s during December when over 10% of traffic to the Give Animals a Voice website cam from YouTube. The viral aspect is also highlighted by importance of traffic from Microsoft Live Mail (Hotmail), which at one point accounted for almost a quarter of all traffic to the site. The traffic also went in the other direction: for the week ending December 13th, the top site visited after Give Animals a Voice was YouTube.

give_animals_a_chance_web_traffic_from_hotmail_youtube_simons_cat_december_2008_chart.png