December 2012 Archives

I spent many hours trying to figure out why I could not install Windows 7 onto a OCZ Vertex 2 (SandForce 1222 controller).

This particular SSD had been running fine in my laptop and still had a Windows 7 install on it but had been moved into a PC whose BIOS would not boot it. Attempting to re-install Windows 7 gave the message "Windows cannot be installed to this disk". The more info dialogue box said something about BIOS saying the disk was unbootable.

Long story short the problem was that I had set a hard disk password when the SSD had been in my Lenovo W520.

The BIOS on my PC mobo (a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H) didn't appear to have an option to set a password so I could unlock the drive so I ended up having to plug it back into my Lenovo to remove the password (by setting it to the empty string).

Another symptom was when attempting to use the OCZ Bootable Toolbox v4.3 (a custom Linux based ISO OCZ provides for firmware updates & secure erase) it would get stuck during boot saying "Waiting as requested ... 12". The 12 is supposed to be 12 seconds, and it should count down to 0 but in my case it just got stuck there.

I knew the drive was not bricked as it was working fine in the Lenovo but I would've expected BIOS to prompt for a password if necessary, not just mark the drive as effectively unusable even though it recognised the drive's presence.

Two months ago I wrote about using Freelancer for video production. A few days after I wrote that the video went viral. What does viral look like?

Traffic

The first sign came as YouTube comment notification emails. I'd been getting a few comments here and there as Will Keith (aka bbillyk on YouTube), the star of the video, has a fan base of his own. But on the morning of 10th October the comments started arriving 10-20 minutes apart and by noon they were coming every minute or two. One of them mentioned Smosh and I discovered Bottles beware! was featured on their front page. Nice.

I credit Smosh with sending "Bottles beware!" viral as they delivered about 30k views in the first day, and from there the video went all over the Interwebs - reddit, Laughing Squid, Boing Boing, 4chan, Bodybuilding.com forums, Know Your Meme, Ebaumsworld and many other sites. Within 24 hours of Smosh's discovery the video garnered 350k views.

Check out the overall breakdown of traffic types.

Roughly half the views (986k of 2m) came from the player being embedded on 3rd party sites with the top 5 being facebook.com (8.6%), redditmedia.com (5.7%) (now at reddit.picurls.com), barstoolsports.com (5.3%), jaidefinichon.com (3.7%), notengotele.com (2.9%). What's encouraging about this breakdown is that no site represents even 10% of the total -- virality is not about hitting any specific site (even though sites like reddit do help), it's about broad reach. See the graph & complete figures.

Being an English speaking person it was really cool to see the video appearing on other language sites - e.g. jaidefinichon.com and notengotele.com are both Spanish language websites. You could tell when the video had reached a new language as batches of comments would appear in Spanish, Portuguese and even Russian -- I'm not sure who this guy is but his channel is pretty popular :)

Direct referral traffic (i.e. links to the YouTube hosted "Bottles beware!" video page) was responsible for 260k views with the top 5 sources being reddit.com (37.6%), facebook.com (31.5%), yonkis.com (4.8%), twitter.com (4.4%), and theawesomer.com (1.2%). See the breakdown.

Unlike the embedded traffic there is clear dominance here by reddit & facebook. However as a percentage of overall traffic reddit and facebook represent only ~5% and ~8.3% of measurable direct traffic, respectively. I obviously can't tell from this data if someone discovers the video via facebook or reddit and shares it via other sites/means.

Twitter

I was very excited to see my video tweeted by Kristen Bell and Freddie Wong, and even the Surfrider Foundation tweeted the video. But it's interesting to note that despite them having over 1.2 million combined followers at the time my total Twitter traffic (embedded + referral) is less than 12k. I can't help but think of Twitter as that crazy old guy on the proverbial soapbox yelling at people on the street -- no one's actually listening.

reddit

It's interesting to see how completely arbitrary a post's success can be on reddit. The video was posted to reddit 5 times with varying titles:

The winner was the rather ambiguous "I was told to put this here". That post got 5,985 up votes, 3,844 down votes (total of 9,739 votes), 1,497 comments, and drove over 98k views. So roughly 10% of redditors who saw this post bothered to up/down vote and/or comment. Note that the exact up & down vote numbers are fuzzed by reddit for anti-spam/anti-gaming reasons.

Will Keith did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit and seems to have a good sense of humour.

YouTube

Another fun aspect of going viral is having others edit the video. One of the earliest edits was this:

My favourite edit would have to be the inevitable lightsaber version :)

And someone always has to do the metal version:

There were several reviews (aside from the awesome Russian guy already linked above). "GangstaHoodNews" did one:

Ray William Johnson (a popular YouTuber):

And as expected some guy had to do fat jokes. The thing I love about this video is that he gets completely panned in the comments. Fat jokes on the Internet? Seriously? Like stealing candy from a baby.

I also received several video responses, mostly crap, but this guy was intriguing:

Curiously, once you get a viral video on YouTube every man and his dog tries to send you their crap video hoping that you'll link to them. It's a real annoyance.

Pics please

Of course, no viral video would be complete without it's own meme images:

The Hero (credit: Know Your Meme comment)
Skeptical 3rd World Kid (credit: quickmeme)
Even cats love him: (credit: imgur)

Demographics

Surprise! The vast the majority of viewers were male.

86.5% male, 13.5% female
full breakdown


Copyright & Monetisation

This video was the confluence of a funny idea and a desire to try out Freelancer. I had never intended to monetise it but once the video went viral I started getting YouTube messages from various parties asking if they could use my video on their TV show, web site and other YouTube channels. October Films were first, wanting to use the video in season 6 of Channel 4's Rude Tube show. Even my former employer Yahoo! reached out to me!

As I had no commercial intentions I said yes to everyone who sought permission. When I discovered that others had ripped the video wholesale and uploaded it to their own YouTube channels without adding commentary or anything of value I filed Copyright Infringement notices with YouTube. YouTube promptly took down the copies so that was cool to see.

Within the first 48 hours I received an intriguing message from Viral Spiral. With zero experience in the online video space I had no idea who they were except that they were offering to manage my YouTube channel now that I had a viral video. There's two parts to their service.

The first part is licensing "Bottles beware!" to interested parties - the same parties that I had happily granted permission to prior to signing with Viral Spiral. :) The general idea is that folks who might use it for TV or other commercial purposes would license the video paying anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand bucks. I put off writing this blog post as I was hoping to have something to report on this front but so far no one has signed.

The second is YouTube premium partner status through Viral Spiral's partnership with Rightster. Essentially Rightster sells and run "premium" ads on my YouTube channel and I get a 50% cut of that. I put the term "premium" in quotes because I'm not entirely sure what this actually means. All I know is that once I signed the advertising rights over to Rightster I started seeing big brand ads running on "Bottles beware!" - including Australian brands like Bing Lee, and ads for TV shows such as Modern Family.

This has been quite lucrative. I should be receiving over $400 in ad revenue shortly (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share earnings data but if someone could confirm that is ok I'd be happy to share the monetisable views & CPM breakdowns).

Considering the video cost all of $30 to produce it's a pretty healthy ROI, nevermind the learnings which for me has been the most valuable part of the whole experience.

How did this all start?

It all began on Wednesday 26th September in the sekret nomitor IRC channel:

15:49 <@sh> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyVHyyuhVAY
15:49 <@sh> rofl
15:49 <@sh> his shirt
15:49 < goosmurf> hahahahahahahahha
15:50 < goosmurf> he's slain a lot of water bottles
15:50 < goosmurf> has anyone counted how many?
15:50 <@sh> haha
15:51 < goosmurf> haha
15:51 <@sh> somebody should compile all his vids
15:51 <@sh> and speed them up
15:51 < goosmurf> 0:53 is hilarious
15:51 <@sh> with a counter
15:51 < goosmurf> he looks so happy lol
15:51 <@sh> hahaha
15:51 < goosmurf> haha
15:51 < goosmurf> how many vids has he got
15:51 <@sh> quite a few i think
15:51 < goosmurf> 115
15:51 < goosmurf> fuck i'm not doing that
15:51 <@sh> they arent all bottles though
15:51 < goosmurf> maybe I can try freelancer.com

Total cost to humanity so far?

About 6.66 man years (over 3,500,000 minutes watched).



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About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from December 2012 listed from newest to oldest.

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