About two months ago, I was going though my old VHS tapes of when I was younger and found a hilarious memory of my childhood. My mom said she submitted this same tape to America’s Funniest Home Videos in 1993, but only to be rejected weeks later.
I thought since viral media was becoming huge on the internet video clip database websites such as Ebaums, YouTube, etc; I thought I could have a shot of it with this one.
After editing and adding the effect quickly in Windows Movie Maker, I posted it to a list of sites to see how far it would go. The list includes YouTube, iFilm, Web Junk 20, Myspace, MuchoSucko, Break, and a few others.
People at first on YouTube picked it up and commented how funny it was. At first I was a little scarred because I wasn’t getting many views or popularity as I hoped for at first. Then I noticed it started to spread on other minor sites and people began posting duplicates all over.
It wasn’t until about the third week a friend of mine called me up and noticed my video I showed him on the front page of Ebaums World. Whether you love them or hate them, you can’t deny the outstanding amount of traffic the site gets.
And there in all its glory Ebaums infamously placed their watermark on my video without my approval whatsoever, which they probably picked up from another site. I wasn’t upset or anything, I was actually happy the video spread onto the homepage and then placed in the extreme section.
In school, people that have known me for a long time and recognized me when I was younger, would call me Ebaums World kid, and even strangers couldn’t believe it was me.
Then, on May 9th, G4 2006 E3 Coverage featured a television advertisement for Ebaums World with my video in the main commercial. (If anyone has a clip of this, please let me know!)
I don’t usually post these type of articles, but I just wanted to let you readers know how easy and extremely fast a idea can spread around the internet, just in this first month. I know this is nothing new or anything, but until you experience something like this personally you have no idea.
Personally for me, the viewer count absolutely amazes me, and little things like finding it on peoples MySpaces and Blogs all over the world with people posting it around saying “Hey, I thought you would like this” makes me happy to this day.
Therefore, I encourage everyone to post anything you think is worthwhile to the net, you never know, it might even make you too an internet star…
