Have We Gone Viral?

13th Jan 2012

Late on Tuesday evening we posted the 2012 ShAFF trailer to Youtube. It’s a cracking film, edited by award winning filmmaker Al Lee of Posing Productions. Al was juggling editing and packing for an imminent trip to Venezuela (another film project so watch this space…). When I saw the video on Wednesday morning it had received a few hundred hits overnight. I was pleased enough with this. Then something strange happened. Despite the Youtube hit counter sticking on 300 and something all day long Twitter was indicating that rather a lot of people were enjoying the trailer. A quick Google uncovered the fact that Youtube are fairly hot on spammers posting videos multiple times on auto-repeat to boost numbers, so they are slow to show the true count whilst they check out the authenticity of the hits. Clever stuff. Anyway, by the end of the day the hit counter suddenly jumped from 300 to 5,000. We were blown away. And then we went to bed. And that means that America and Canada wake up! The following morning it had more than doubled to 12,000. Crazy. Last year’s trailer had 28,000 hits in a whole year. Well last night, exactly 48 hours after launch, we matched last year’s total, and this morning we’re up to 34,000.

So has it ‘gone viral’?

I did a quick search this morning and found a few definition. Here’s one:

“Viral means becoming extremely popular in a very short amount of time.”

Here’s another:

“According to Wikipedia viral means, an object or pattern that is able to induce some agents to replicate it, resulting in many copies being produced and spread around. So basically if you have something (like a video) and you share (or give) it to your online friends, there’s two ways to make something go viral. You can ask your friends to share it with their online community, or your video can be so good that they automatically share it and those people share it, and so forth. The latter would be a perfect example of something “going viral.””

I guess it’s more a question of scale. When some guy accidentally allowed his dog to chase some deer in Richmond Park recently and his son filmed the ensuing panic on his mobile and then uploaded it to Youtube it did something very similar to the above, but on a vastly different scale with millions of hits instead of thousands. Still, we’re excited to have produced a video that’s captured people’s imagination within our world of adventure and extreme sport. Thanks Al for a sterling edit, and thanks also to Hey Sholay, a Sheffield Band who kindly let us use their one of their tracks for the score.

Here's the video: