When Hitler Goes Viral – A Report
How do I put this? I’ve been putting crap online for entertainment purposes for almost a decade, and I’ve never had something happen like what took place today. Hitler Makes a YouTube Video, a short that I posted almost a year ago, picked today to go viral. As of this writing, YouTube shows the video as having almost 70,000 views within the last 24 hours.
From what I can put together, here is the sequence of events that led to where we are now:
- February 26, 2009 – I scramble (and succeed) in finding a caption-less version of the iconic scene from Der Undertang. Edit and render video in a couple hours. Upload. Await my internet dollars and supermodels.
- February 27, 2009 – Plaster the video link on Facebook, Twitter, company email, and on forums that I frequent, because clearly this will generate enough word of mouth to set the world ablaze. Confirm that my personal info on my YouTube account is correct so that they know where to deliver my internet dollars and supermodels.
- February Through November – Forget about the video for the most part. Convince myself that internet dollars work like Google Adsense, and they won’t send me a check until I reach a certain threshhold.
- December 1st, 2009 – Inexplicably, a Polish website posts the video in a collection of Hitler parodies. The video’s hit count doubles, a modest success. I begin bragging to friends that I’m “huge in Poland”. Take solace in the fact that of all places, Poland is probably one that deserves to take the most satisfaction from such a meme. Start looking online for the exchange rate on Polish internet dollars.
- February 2010 – Start using Reddit.com to help promote The Daily Blink, and I feel guilty that my account’s history is a list of every comic strip we’ve done and little else. So, I start trying to create other content and give upvotes to other articles I like. Somehow, I turn this in my head to finding other content to submit. I decide to throw the Hitler video on and see what happens.
- February 15th, 8AM – I post the Hitler video and it immediately gets two downvotes, thus almost assuring nobody will see it. I pout, realize that everyone’s probably sick of Hitler parodies by now, shrug, and go on with my day.
- 6:30 PM – Check back and notice that the reddit submission somehow survived and stuck around on the funny section the entire day. A few hundred hits on the video and a couple comments. I deem this awesome.
Now, SOMEWHERE in this time frame, as far as I can tell, a reddit reader bothered to share the video outside the website. I’m making some assumptions, but the chain that I find is that the first blog to link to it was Grrl Scientist on her blog, Living the Scientific Life. If I’m wrong about that and am skipping a step in the chain, I apologize, but right now that’s where the footprints start, because…
- February 16th, 3:26AM – Cory Doctorow links to the video on BoingBoing, and we’re off to the races.
- 9:20 AM - Kotaku gets in on the action. Despite the video getting a lot more comments than normal, I am oblivious to any of this happening.
- 11:00 AM – A Co-worker says, “Hey, your video is on Kotaku!” I check out the site and squee. I then realize that Kotaku got the link from BoingBoing and become incredibly annoying to any and all who interact with me for the rest of the day, because they MUST BE TOLD HOW I JUST WON THE INTERNETS.
I spent the rest of the day attempting to concentrate on work and mostly succeeding, though when I found out the video was on The Huffington Post, my head finally exploded. I don’t know why The Huffington Post would qualify more as a head-combustible than BoingBoing. Most likely it was the rule of threes working its magic.
Once I got home and was able to earnestly sit down, read tweets, catch up on email, and do a bit of digging, I wrapped my head around several observations that I would now like to share.
1. I now have personal experience in the fact that the success and failure of a “viral video” is completely unpredictable. As I said up top, I’ve been putting media online in different forms since 2001, and some of it hasn’t been half bad. I worked on Return of Pink Five, and I once had George Takei dancing around with a balloon hat on his head while he asked about the color of my co-hosts pubic hair. This was on YouTube for all to see, and instead, it’s the extremely derivative Hitler parody that screams across the internet at the speed of light.
The director of Pink Five, Trey Stokes, has thought long and hard about the concept of viral videos, mostly because people have tried to hire him with the hopes that he will make one for them. Trey realized from the start that the idea was silly, and that no amount of money or resources can guarantee or manufacture word-of-mouth success. If there’s anything we learned on Return of Pink Five, it was that our goal was clearly to make the film we wanted to, and not to make a viral hit, otherwise we would have spent 10% of the energy and money on it since it would have just as good of a chance of exploding. Case in point: While we were trying to wrap up the last volume, The Guild came onto the scene, and we all nodded with silent appreciation for Felicia Day and her ability to show everyone how it should be done.
2. Cory Doctorow is much more considerate than the rest of the internet. I say this because only he and one other blog that I saw bothered to give credit to the author of the video that they were plastering on their site. I ended up embedding an annotation at the end when I realized that 95% of people seeing the video were doing so at websites other than youtube.com. Add the fact that I didn’t use my own personal YT account to upload the video, and it could be slightly more difficult for someone to get a hold of me if they were interested in the work. If you went to the YT site and looked, you’d see my name right in the description, but most people wrote their blogs describing “some guy” or not bothering at all. I think in the end I don’t care that much, but Cory obviously gets extra brownie points for taking the extra 10 seconds to do so. I sent him an email just to thank him for this.
3. The John Williams Barbershop Kid apparently has a sense of humor. He added the video to his favorites. I still wanna sit the guy down and just talk for an hour about being a “YouTube personality”. It mystifies me on every level. I’m probably not justified in calling him “kid”, but I’ll stick with it because it’s my petty version of sticking it to the man. (Yes, Corey: 100k suscribers makes you “the man”. Or, in your case, “the kid.”)
4. This will probably go on for a couple more days. I am incredibly curious to see what that looks like, and how far it goes, from a purely analytical perspective.
5. Final Thought: I have no idea what to do next. Seriously. Am I supposed to do something now? Is this like some kind of platform for the next few days from which to step up to something slightly larger? You’d think that after multiple attempts at sharing online media, I would be ready for just such an occasion when people find something that I did to be of value. Nope! I am definitely one that’s not afraid to introduce myself and network, but there’s something about exploiting something like this that comes off as whorish. It’s a Hitler parody. I don’t know if that serves as a basis to form a community around, or drive traffic to a website that has absolutely nothing to do with Hitler parodies. I’m pretty sure what I can expect to result from this is slightly more Twitter followers (check) and the chance to be on one or two podcasts (in progress). Nobody is suddenly going to ask me to write a book, start an online webseries, or co-host a legitimate podcast.
Maybe I should be nicer to the John Williams Barbershop Kid so he’ll give me advice. Did I say kid? I meant digital media genius.
Kudos.
I would just like to say that I saw this version, and it felt like the perfect way to finally being a close to this meme, so I was surprised to see it wasn’t actually made at the end of the phenomenon.
I also recognised your name on the pop-up as one of the guys from theforce.net boards who used to make Star Wars fanfilms, so instantly rushed over to see if you had a blog.
Huzzah.
wonderful video, chris, and yes, i did pick your video up from reddit. i do apologize for not linking to you as the original author of that parody. i’ve been without wifi recently, so i sneak in to a cafe (where i am right now, in fact) for a few minutes of internet connectivity here and there, and none of those minutes have been devoted to proper research.
Hey, it’s Adam Bertocci, currently known to the Internet as the “Two Gentlemen of Lebowski” guy.
“5. Final Thought: I have no idea what to do next.”
I’m going to be honest with you.
This is the thought that keeps me up at night.
I’ve had a lot of fun with my little burst of Internet fame. I’ve built a little Facebook army. I’ve made a little money. I’ve even had some legitimate career boosts… so far. But it could all go away in a second.
I’ve tried and failed so many times to make the Internet like one of my projects, and it finally happened big-time and I hope I’m making the right decisions at this time.
But I’ve found that the Lebowski fans do not, as a whole, care about my other projects (past or present). I mean, sometimes when I post something they’re nice about it, but they are not an army to send out at my beck and call. And I know they _say_ sometimes that they’d like me to do another pop culture mashup like TGOL, but that’s not what they actually want. That would just be trying to recapture lightning in a bottle. That’s hard to do.
I don’t fool myself; they’re not interested in me. They’re there because they like “The Big Lebowski”. That’s okay. That’s their right.
I don’t use YouTube much, but of my 13 uploads, 2 of them are piggybacking on established memes (the Watchmen contest and literal music videos). They have ten, a hundred, a thousand times as many hits as my original pieces.
What you did was give them, as Sammy Goldwyn said, the same, only different. That’s about as good as you can ask for. But in a way you’re fortunate that you used your RiffRaff account and not your personal, because RiffRaff is an appropriate account for “lol pop culture things” content, so hopefully you’ll rack up some subscribers that will enjoy your other stuff there.
Interesting story. My theory is that the time was just ripe now for a nice and clean kill of this particular meme.
I heard about it on the Bad Astronomy blogg
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/02/17/godwin-godwinned-ftw/
I would just like to say that I saw this version, and it felt like the perfect way to finally being a close to this meme, so I was surprised to see it wasn’t actually made at the end of the phenomenon.
I also recognised your name on the pop-up as one of the guys from theforce.net boards who used to make Star Wars fanfilms, so instantly rushed over to see if you had a blog.
Huzzah.
I think someone took down your video. You should repost it.