my thoughts on our viral video

Well guys, I've peaked. 

I've had my 15-minutes of fame.

It's all downhill from here!

If you didn't know, we recently had a video of our Sadie girl go viral last week.

This one right here.

It's been strange. It's been fun and scary and exciting and rage-inducing and strange.

I've really wanted to blog my thoughts so I can remember this. But also because I am getting a little sick of answering the same questions over and over again, haha.

How it all went down:

Sadie loves our cat. Obvs. She LOVES when we bring the cat in after a nap. We decided to record it one time. BAM. Funny video. I sent it to a couple friends and they told me to post it. My bff, Katie, asked if I could make the video public so that she could share it. None of my posts, especially Sadie ones, are public so I thought about it for a while. But I figured Katie is an awesome girl, so she would have awesome friends. What's the big deal if some of them see it?

Fast forward a few hours- it's been shared around 50 times. It was at this point that I had a mini-freak out. I post about Sadie A LOT. But I always post very privately. My Instagram and Facebook are on lock-down. I don't have any friends or followers who are people I don't know. I even made this blog private to keep her pictures from getting to strangers. But now my daughter was being passed around and it freaked me out. I had a long talk with Nathan about it, texted with Katie about it, and yes.. I even prayed about it. My primary teachers would be so proud.

I decided I felt good about it. Sadie's video was bringing a lot of people happiness, and that made me happy. It was just the one video. It didn't give away and personal information. And besides, not that many people were gonna see it. Oh wait..

Over the course of the next couple days, it kinda blew up over Facebook. It was crazy! I had a group of lovely girlfriends convince me to put the video on YouTube to try and really make it go viral. I finally decided to just do it. But we really didn't think anything would happen. So many people had already seen it, we didn't think they'd also share the YouTube video. Our awesome friends shared it again for us, and we got a few hundred hits that first night, and that's all that we really expected.

We woke up the next morning to an email from the local new station here, KSL, asking to use our video. We flipped out, said yes, and thought Sadie being on the local news was going to be the coolest thing ever, and the end to our YouTube careers. 

The next morning we woke up to even more emails. A LOT of emails. Emails from Good Morning America and The Today Show and a million different people wanting to use or license our video. There was also one very long article in the Daily Mail, and another on TMZ.

We had no idea what to do.

After doing a lot of research, we decided to go with a licensing company. After researching those, we found that the biggest and most popular one had already contacted us. Nathan came home early for lunch and called the guy who emailed us and worked out a deal. The guy paid us $200 to sign with him. We signed a deal for a 70/30 split. We didn't pay him a dime. He only got money if he got us money. We retained all the rights to the video. He got right to work and got higher paying ads on our videos. He took all those emails from TV networks and websites and worked out deals to try and get us paid for them using the video. He started policing YouTube to get rid of people stealing our video for their own account. He also contacted the people who had already use the video to get money from them too. We basically just got to sit back at that point and watch the video explode.

And explode it did.

We made the Facebook video private again once the YouTube video took off. It had around 640,000 though views, and 13,000 shares. The YouTube video took off just as fast. There were times we were getting 60,000 views an hour.  That's almost 17 views per second! Over the next couple days it seemed to be everywhere. Good Morning America. Inside Edition. The Today Show. KSL (again). Buzzfeed. (twice!) People. E! News. Huffington Post. 9gag. Tumblr. Yahoo. Ellen's website. And a billion more smaller websites and news shows. Then it went international and we saw articles in many different languages. It was crazy. We just got to sit back and watch.

Things have died down quite a bit. George Takei shared it today and we saw another big spike, but I think it will slow down more and more every day. It's been nuts, but a really cool experience.

How much are we getting paid:

This is the question I get the most, haha. Here's the answer: We don't know. YouTube has a very complicated way of calculating rates- it's not per views like everyone says. It's about what ads are being played, if people watch the ads, if people click the ads, and how long they watch your video. An average, according to our licensing company, is around 50 cents per thousand views. Could be more, could be less. We won't know until the end of September. We also don't know how much our agent has been selling the video for. The invoices for that can take several weeks. So I will let you guys know when I know, haha.

How I feel about it all:

-This is easier in bullet points.

-Mean comments- obviously, this was something that really put a damper on it all sometimes. The first article released was the Daily Mail, which is a British tabloid, and is apparently somewhat famous for it's rude and idiotic commenters. It was hard that the first article out had such awful comments. And I mean awful. People telling me to die. People calling me horrible names. People swearing at me. People telling me my child should be taken away. People accusing me of child and animal abuse. People saying my house was a disaster. People making very rude judgments about me and my life based off a 90 second video. It was really hard to read. Nathan and I tried to prepare for bad comments, but I guess I didn't realize just how awful people can be. I commented on that post to shut down some haters, and it felt good. The Inquisitir did a whole article about my response and that was awesome. On other sites, people were a lot more positive. There were, and still are, some really rude and horrible people, but there was more happy stuff than awful stuff. So that was nice. It was super hard at first, and I really started losing my faith in humanity. I just couldn't, and still can't, believe that someone can sit down, write a horrible comment about someone they don't know, then just go about their day and still fell good about themselves. It breaks my heart. But after a while I stopped reading the comments. And when I did catch a few, it didn't hurt me as much. Honestly, I am a very sensitive person, and I feel like this helped me develop a bit of a thicker skin.

-The overall feeling of this was excitement. It was really fun to watch it explode! My favorite thing was to read the nice comments or the articles about the video. I LOVED seeing how happy Sadie was making people. She's been the biggest blessing we could have ever imagined. She is always so happy and silly and such a light in our lives. It felt really good to share her light with the world.

-It was funny to see the people who suddenly wanted to contact me. I totally get that it's exciting to watch someone you know have a viral video, but some of the people were just strange. It was fun for to reconnect with some people! I had an ex-boyfriend text me, I had a lot of my lovely high school friends chat with me, I had some friends stop by. I don't think they were trying to get in on the fame or anything; I think they were genuinely excited. But there were a couple people I hardly knew from a million years ago who who shared every post and tag me in all this stuff and refer to me as their "really good friend" and I was thinking, "I don't think I have even seen you in real life in 12 years." But oh well :)

-We had a great support system with friends and family. SO many people were excited for us. Honestly, I owe this whole experience to my "Internet friends" (don't worry, I know them almost all in real life now) from my old missionary support group. You know.. remember when Nathan left and I joined a waiting for a missionary support group and met some of my very best friends and then when our missionaries came home we started a different group so we could all stay involved in each other's lives? Well those awesome ladies are the ones who first shared the Facebook video, then talked me into uploading it to YouTube, then re-shared the video, then watched the views climb with me, and even stayed up late while we all waited for it to hit 1 million. They are amazing. And this is all their fault!

-This was really fun, but we have no intentions of being famous in any way. We may upload another video or two in the next little while, just because we have a lot of subscribers on YouTube and kinda feel like we own them at least one more video. But we don't plan to promote it or anything like that. Neither of us would be good at being famous. I learned that very quickly from reading all the mean comments. Really, we just look at it as a random, once-in-a-life-time thing. We don't want to exploit Sadie. Really it was just a silly video we filmed. I don't want to try and force my daughter to star in all these funny videos so we can make more money. It was fun when it happened by chance, but I don't want to deal with trying to recreate that magic. 

So that's that. We are sitting around 3 and a half million views right now. Maybe we'll make it to four! Who knows. Either way, it's been a really fun and strange experience for us. Sadie is definitely earning her keep :)