Washington – The latest weapon in the war on cancer harnesses the power of a heretofore untapped resource: our love of funny online cat videos.
Cats vs Cancer, a nonprofit organisation and website launched in December by buddies Tom O’Connor and Eddie Peña, is counting on people’s seemingly insatiable interest in online feline frivolity.
By posting cute and silly kitty videos, the two aim to garner enough page views to attract advertisers, with ad revenues going to a different cancer-related charity each month.
Visitors can also make direct donations via a “Donate Meow!” button on the site.
But simply watching the videos and spreading the word via social media is, O’Connor and Peña say, helping fight cancer.
In its first month, the site attracted about 130,000 visitors, O’Connor says.
That’s an admittedly tiny number in the grand scheme of Internet hits: Some YouTube cat videos have millions of hits. But he says that’s not bad considering there’s been little promotion and no advertising other than a free placement on an electronic billboard in New York’s Times Square, “a very generous donation from the company that owns the billboard,” O’Connor says.
The site’s most-clicked-on video to date? That would be “lazy cat can’t reach arrogant pigeon.”
In choosing organisations to receive their donations, O’Connor says, “we’re looking at smaller charities that are doing good work and for which maybe our contribution will be a bit more meaningful” than for one of the major players.
They also seek geographic variety, “to spread the love across the country,” O’Connor says.
For now, the kitties subsist on the thin gruel of revenue from small ads that a Google service generates and places on the Cats vs. Cancer page. The company gets a small amount when an ad is clicked on. O’Connor says those pay only pennies per page view. O’Connor hopes that by next year the site will have enough visitors that he can sell ads directly to companies and raise more money for the project.
In December, he says, the ad revenue – several hundred dollars – went to the Vickie S. Honeycutt Foundation in Charlotte, which provides funds to support teachers battling cancer. Adam White, one of the foundation’s founders, says, “Cats vs Cancer is such a great gesture and a great idea. Tom kept saying, ‘I know it won’t be much,’ but I say you don’t have to make a million-dollar donation to make a million-dollar impact.”
January’s funds were earmarked for Brent’s Place in Denver, a long-term “safe and clean” housing facility for pediatric cancer patients whose immune systems are compromised; kids and their families stay there free for as long as need be. Bridget Fitzpatrick, the organization’s development director, says, “Cats vs. Cancer turned out to be a fun and engaging fundraiser for us. Our families have been following the cats” on the Web site for entertainment — and to help drive up the page-view numbers. As for the likely size of the donation, Fitzpatrick says that while she anticipates it won’t be large, “it’s the individual, small donations like this that keep our organization running.”
Cats vs Cancer donates about 85 percent of the funds it receives, O’Connor says. That percentage should increase as ad dollars and donations grow, he says, noting that the organisation’s expenses (mostly related to Web-domain registrations and basic business software purchases, plus a small fee to the Network for Good to manage online donations) are largely fixed. O’Connor, Peña and tech director Adrian Baker donate their time, he says.
O’Connor, 33, and Peña, 31, who met while attending Georgetown University in the early 2000s, live in New York; O’Connor works for Fox News, and Peña is in Internet advertising.
So how do they pick the videos? Same way we all do. “We go to YouTube and type in ‘cat’ and any other thing you can think of,” O’Connor says. “‘Cat versus lemon’ or ‘cat versus rice cooker.’
“They also check the “cat stuff” on other popular video-sharing sites, trying to “stay abreast of trending videos as they begin to go viral.”
What about dogs? Some recent reports suggest dog videos have gotten more popular than cat videos these days. O’Connor says he wasn’t aware of that trend. But he allows that if things go as planned with Cats vs. Cancer, dog videos could well come into play one day.
“We are Cats vs Cancer,” he says, “but we aren’t anti-dog. We love dogs, too.”
Huget is a freelance writer who focuses on health and nutrition.
Washington Post-Bloomberg