Grumpy Cat Falls From Internet Stardom

Didit Editorial

11 years ago

By Steve Baldwin | March 6, 2014

Last year, Grumpy Cat was the star of SXSW, the trendy annual geek-a-thon/music festival that’s seen keynotes from major Silicon Valley players over the years, including Mark Zuckerberg. But as SXSW gears up for its 2014 show, which opens tomorrow in Austin, Texas, Grumpy Cat’s star appears to be in recession. To paraphrase Matt Cutts, one could “stick a fork” in this meme.

While recent metrics from Alexa.com show grumpycats.com (the official home of the Arizona-based feline) holding at a respectable 108,980 Global rank, this ranking is actually down 19,071 notches from the prior 3-month period.

Google Trend Data shows that Internet interest in the dour-faced cat peaked in December, 2012, long before last year’s SXSW and the onslaught of media attention that followed. The cat’s grip on the popular imagination has steadily declined since then. The fall from grace has been in spite of major media mentions for the cat throughout 2013, including prominent mentions in Fox News, Time.com, Forbes, CNN, CBS, and elsewhere in broadcast media.

To be fair, Grumpy Cat’s drop in overall visibility in the past 12 months was not helped by a long term secular decline in the popularity of cats relative to both dogs and birds. (Birds may be better indexing in post-2011 data because of the widespead adoption of bird-oriented mobile applications such as Angry Birds and Flappy Birds.)