Trivia / Jelle's Marble Runs

• Colbert Bump:
  • After being featured on ESPN's annual ESPN 8 "The Ocho" segment in mid-2019, Jelle's Marble Runs saw a surge of subscribers and followers.
  • The COVID-19 Pandemic caused virtually every major spectator sport to be postponed or outright canceled in March 2020. Because of this, people desperate for competitive sports spawned a meme ("Day X without sports"), which caused a clip of the 2017 Sand Marble Rally to go viral on Twitter with the the hashtag "#comet". As a result, the 5th race of the Marbula One Grand Prix saw a massive rise in views during the premier (over 11.6k concurrent viewers).
  • This was further supported when it was featured on a segment by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about sports during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how most major league sports were struggling to reopen. He not only proposed Jelle's Marble Runs as a fun alternative, but he also proceeded to become the sole sponsor of Marble League 2020 and pledged to donate $100k to various food banks and charities in the name of the winners of each event. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in another surge of followers, pushing the channel to over a million subscribers.
• Doing It for the Art: Jelle Bakker posted his various marble runs online for years without any thought to monetizing his content. All he wanted to do was share his love of marbles with others who shared his interests.
• Money, Dear Boy: Upon realizing that the channel had developed a large and growing fanbase, Dion persuaded Jelle to monetize it so that Jelle, who is autistic and never had a paying occupation, could earn an income and support himself.
• Promoted Fanboy: Greg Woods was a fan of the marble runs and recorded a running commentary of one for fun. Jelle loved it so much that Greg became the channel's official commentator.

---