THIS YOUTUBE VIDEO HAS LEGS

The creator of the little film 'Spiders on Drugs' reveals just how he
spawned a hit.

I had turned my back on the film industry and made my second film in
my backyard, with $300 cash and an old Super 8mm camera I bought on
eBay.

No one was more surprised than me when Spiders on Drugs became a minor
hit on the film festival circuit this summer, by which I mean it was
seen by tens of people at festivals all over the planet.

But the festival guides usually listed it as a "spoof," which I
thought ruined the joke. My fantasy had been to rent a slot on local
TV at 2 a.m. and run it as a public service announcement. I imagined
people getting sucked in, and their minds blowing like old nickel fuses.

That's when I became interested in YouTube. I made three little films,
and they got a few hundred hits each. Meanwhile I had discovered the
greatest thing about YouTube: you can connect with everyone on the
planet, because everyone is doing it. That's also the biggest problem.
There are 65,000 videos posted a day. If you go to the videos page and
click on "Most Recent," you'll see the newest hundred uploads have no
hits at all. That's the fate that awaits most clips, even many good ones.

How to stand out in all that slush? Late at night I had an idea. A
simple experiment I could run right from my desktop that very night.

I had uploaded Spiders on Drugs, but it was in the private section of
my YouTube home page. That's where you can upload stuff you only want
to show your friends. But I couldn't post Spiders publicly because
Comedy Central had seen it at the Worldwide Short Film Festival in
Toronto, and bought a year-long Internet license for its broadband
channel, Motherload. I had hoped its appearance on its massively
popular site might send a little traffic down my country lane, but CC
hadn't even posted it yet, and hadn't returned my calls for a month.

I ran my "experiment," and within an hour I started getting comments,
which on average happens about once per thousand views. The hit count
suddenly went up to 300. Wow, I thought, it worked. What I didn't know
then was that it takes hours for the number of hits to refresh.

I got up around 10 a.m., made breakfast and gazed into space for a
while, as is my wont. Then I remembered the experiment. Did I take
that posting down? I ran to the computer and roused it from its
slumber. Safari. Canada.com. YouTube. Home page. Come on, come on ...
loading ... loading ...

20,000 hits.

My inbox was clogged with messages: "Do you know your spider film is
on the top 10 list at ..."

I clicked around the Net. It was everywhere. Someone had already sold
it to Ebaum's World for $500, where it was the Editor's Pick. I sat
sucking my teeth and watching the hit count go up 10,000 at a time. I
had no idea what to do. The phone rang. I was screening my calls in
case it was the rental agency. But it was Comedy Central.

My parents came over for lunch. I showed them the total - 70,000 -
and told them what had happened. Then I noticed there was a second
posting called Spiders on Drugs. It had been uploaded by a guy I'll
call PaddyWagon. He already had 5,000 hits. It was a crappy looking
bootleg with an "Ebaum's World" logo emblazoned on the front. So much
for never selling out.

I e-mailed PaddyWagon, explained the situation, and begged him to take
his reposting down. He told me to blow it out my ass. When I looked at
YouTube's home page I was right at the top. When I clicked on my own
icon there were 10 clones under it, some of them already with hundreds
of hits.

Comedy Central called again. I guess the long months of unreturned
e-mails were over. When I told them what had happened they just
laughed. I felt a great surge of relief. Then they asked if I could
take my posting down. I said if I did that, the clones would win.
There must be a way to get all that traffic over to the Motherload.

And how come they hadn't posted my film there yet? They said they'd
check into it. I said I would ask YouTube to take down everything,
with my posting last. I e-mailed YouTube. I e-mailed them 20 times. No
reply. But hey, the kids who started the site are twentysomething and
they just got $1.5 billion. I wouldn't be answering my e-mails either.
And by now I'd begun to think I wanted to stay with YouTube anyway.

All weekend long I e-mailed clones' YouTube home pages, and most of
them took their postings down. What really hurt was the quality of the
Ebaum bootleg, and the fact that many of the clones had catchy titles
like SPIDERS ON DRUGS! (SPOOF!) or FUNIEST S--- I HAF EVER SEIN.

On Saturday I was the #1 top-rated, top favourite, most discussed and
top director on all of YouTube. Sunday I came off the This Week page
and went onto the This Month page, which left PaddyWagon with a clear
field. It looked for a while like his posting would eclipse mine.

Six days in, the hit count was up to 750,0000 and I had over a
thousand e-mails. I was shovelling them out like snow when I found one
that said:

MTV - REQUEST - URGENT!!!

They wanted to show the film later that day on MTV Live. I e-mailed
back and asked how much they paid. They said they had no budget to pay
for footage, this was more like free exposure. I wrote that I was
already dying from exposure, but they could show my film for free on
one condition: they had to stop playing Britney Spears videos and put
The Aphex Twin in high rotation. I never heard back.

As the morning progressed, friends in office cubicles all over the
planet started sending me links that were circulating their workplace.

But PaddyWagon had the top rated, top favourite, most discussed clip
of the week on YouTube, whereas I had been relegated to the dusty This
Month bin. It was a bitter pill. By noon PaddyWagon was closing in on
a hundred thou, there were 40 clones screaming EBAUM'S WORLD roaring
up the charts, a Spanish version and a German version.

Some guy had even photo-shopped a big red star over top of the spiders
and filled it with info about his skater clothing line.

Finally, around lunchtime, YouTube replied to my hundredth e-mail and
asked for proof that Spiders on Drugs was my film. I said it had been
on the film festival circuit for six months and directed them to a few
websites that had had me listed as the creator. Around 11 p.m. on
Monday night, I clicked on PaddyWagon's link and it was gone. Across
the top of the page was an ugly red stamp like a police DO NOT CROSS
banner:

THIS CLIP HAS BEEN REMOVED AT THE REQUEST OF
CONTENT WAS USED WITHOUT PERMISSION

As I say, the most amazing thing about YouTube is you can connect with
everyone, even your enemies (unless they block you from their site).

PaddyWagon blocked me from commenting, but I could still watch the
films on his homepage. He had uploaded about 30 clips, and 25 of them
were of his new baby, a real little cutie. He looked like an okay guy.
The sort of guy who works a dull job and dreams of better days ahead.

Anyway, it's 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, one week since I had the idea. I've
just hit the million mark, and there are 55 pages of comments, many of
which say things like CANADA ROCKS! and I LOVE CANADA!

The funny thing is, I've been showing the script for Spiders on Drugs
to Canadian film producers for seven years. Nobody bit. I could have
made a thousand of these little films in the meantime, but I was tied
up with committees and meetings.

But that's all in the past, just like the Canadian film industry. And
Hollywood, for that matter. The long dark meeting of my soul is over.
I'm shooting my next film in my living room as I type. And then, I
think I'll lie down for a bit.

Andrew Struthers is a Victoria-based filmmaker and journalist. This is
an edited version of a piece that appears on the Canadian website thetyee.ca.

My Wild Million-Hit Ride on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyVkWqJ_Q7U