Minnesota’s Internet Cat Video Festival Attracts 13,000 Attendees

The Internet Cat Video Festival attracted one of its biggest attendance records to date. The fourth annual event dedicated solely to the cultural obsession with cat videos drew a crowd of 13,000 people on August 12, 2015.

This year’s Internet Cat Video Festival, hosted at CHS Field in St. Paul, began with Mayor Chris Coleman throwing out a ceremonial ball of yarn(!!!). Afterwards, the 13,000 festival attendees enjoyed clips of cats displayed on the stadium’s digital scoreboard, including a video of a cat scaring away a bear and a spoof of Jurassic Park with dinosaurs replaced with furry little felines. The night ended with the Golden Kitty Award, a recognition of the best cat video of the past year, officially going to the clip “Cat Behavior Finally Explained.”

Debuting in 2012, the Internet Cat Video Festival previously took place at the Walker Center for the Arts and the Minnesota State Fair. Vice even created a documentary about all the famous cats and their appearances at the Minnesota festival called Lil Bub & Friendz. The documentary features, of course, Lil Bub and other well-known internet feline faces like Grumpy Cat (who has her own feature film from Lifetime) and Keyboard Cat.

If the Internet Cat Video Festival isn’t enough to satiate your need for feline-focused clips, you can also check out The Friskies, where last year’s best videos were selected by YouTube stars like Grace Helbig and Zach King.