I know you did this analysis a few months ago, but now with the cons in progress and the ones that wouldn't have Jared having already happened, do you notice a difference in the amount of audience in the ones where he was and the ones he wasn't? At first it seemed so to me. But we had two cons where I heard comments from the actors about how crowded it was. And one had Jared and the other didn't.
So the problem is that I have ADHD which means I get bored with topics, but also I realized that I needed to control for more variables and get a lot more data.
For example, I predicted that Columbus would do better than SF regardless of if Jared showed up. Why? At the cons, they'll ask how many new timers and at least half if not more of the audience raises their hands.
If it's a new city in a place with a lot of Supernatural fans, then you'll get a high turn out and Ohio is definitely a place with a lot of Supernatural fans.
A lot of these first timers find out about the conventions through local media and, if it's the first one for their city, they aren't going to care as much which specific guests will attend as long as at least one lead is there.
Conversely, if a new city has a low turn out, it may not be because of Jared absent, but because of a low marketing reach or interest in Supernatural. Therefore, I don't think you can use new cities to accurately judge the Jared effect.
At SFcon, which is a well established con, the audience dropped by probably a half, definitely 1/3, but then a lot of us knew we could do other cons with Jared. That's a con where I think you can measure how much the con suffered by not having Jared attend. So we should only be looking at cons where Jared is added in or didn't attend this year.
But if you look at, say Seattle, Jared was added rather late, so that doesn't show how many would've showed up had he been added earlier. If I had known earlier, I would've switched SF for Seattle, but by the time Seattle was announced, I didn't have the ability. In the summer, a lot of people have vacation plans, so you'll want something that's announced ahead of time by at least 3 months.
Also, at SFcon, JDM dropped as well, so you can't say that Jared alone was the reason it dropped so dramatically from last year. If JDM had been there, I suspect it would be closer to Burbank.
So you'll need cons where Jared attended last year, but didn't this year: SFcon
Or cons where Jared was added with a decent amount of time: Charlotte, DC, Orlando
[Please let me know if I'm missing any!]
The problem with cons where Jared was added in was that I'll need data from other cons/other years at that con that show how many more seats were bought in comparable time spans. I would have to grab screenshots from a lot of other cons and calculate how many seats are sold first month, second month, etc, and then compare that to the Jared added on cons in order to ascertain if there's a difference between a natural increase versus people joining just because of Jared.
I'm not spending my time doing that. If someone wants to grab that data for me, I'd be happy to run the numbers, but that's a lot of work and my ADHD brain has already moved onto other more interesting data sets.
More than all that, having attended both Burbank and SFcon, there were a lot of Jared fans at both! At SFcon, there were a lot of people running around with these large red pins that said Team Moose. There were people wearing Jared/Sam shirts and he got votes close to Dean and Castiel despite fewer fans there relative to the other two.
I think it's safe to say that SFcon isn't returning because Jared wasn't there, but a sample size of 1 is not a good sample size. That may reflect the people of Bay Area more than the Supernatural con fandom as a whole.
[I'm also struck by now many men and families with small children attend the SFcon as compared to the other cons]
One interesting thing is that this shows that many of our filmers are more likely to be Jared leaning fans. It also proves to me that Jensen/Misha fans are not more likely to attend Friday/Sat. There used to be this claim by Jared antis that Jared fans were terrible to the other cast members and only showed up on Sunday.
At both Burbank/SF, the turn out for question asking and Fri/Sat panels was embarrassingly low and there were times when no one went up to ask a question.
Sunday was absolutely packed at SFcon compared to the other two days. Lots of empty seats earlier. I also noticed that there was a greater percentage of new people on Friday and Sat compared to Sunday. It was about 1/2 new on Sat and 1/3 new on Sunday.
I think that it's more a reflection of the GA than fans of particular actors.
For example, I noticed at SFcon a lot of people saying, "Who's that????" in regards to some con staples like Adam Rose and Jason Manns. I was with people who had to be reminded who Kim and Bri were. They also didn't remember the golem episode, but when I pulled up photos of Adam Rose and they saw him in a construction vest, they recognized him. So I think the low turn out is less people actively disliking other guests, but people who genuinely don't know them.