Going Viral Twice In Two Weeks

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A few weeks ago I posted an early version of my Teletext-Twitter app to GitHub, the open source software community. It started as an idea on The TV Forum and I ended up making it over a weekend. I posted links to the repository on Reddit and Twitter and also some other places and thought nothing of it. Then, a few hours later, my phone starts buzzing its tits off...


The Raspberry Pi Foundation had got wind of it via a hashtag search or something and decided to retweet it, Facebook it, and Google+ it (*giggle*) to all of their followers. Thousands of people saw it.

It’s an odd feeling. Other big twitter accounts in the maker and tech communities picked it up, and then it turned up on an article on Trusted Reviews: Resurrect Teletext as your Twitter feed with this ace Raspberry Pi bake

And it was exhilarating! I liked the attention. A bit odd, but I enjoyed it. One thing I didn’t enjoy was the way it felt like everything got away from me. Sometimes people thought I’d coded the whole thing, including the teletext inserter bit. Some articles and posts got details of the software and teletext in general massively incorrect. It sucked a bit, because once the genie was out of the bottle I had no chance to repair the damage. And then I started to worry about things for a few days until it died down a bit. But for a few days I felt a bit uncomfortable.

My 15 minutes of fame over, things returned to normal. Until Saturday 10th February, 2018. A day that will go down for me as one of the strangest in my life.

Part the first

High Street, Edinburgh. The scene of this Earth-shattering event.


I was walking down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile to meet a friend when I encountered a lot of people fresh out of a pub. It was a rugby weekend in Edinburgh: France were in town to play Scotland in the Six Nations championship. They clearly were having a good time. Then I saw a couple of them start moving around and picking some road cones and barriers from some roadworks on the side of the street. Uh oh...

I don’t know why I grabbed my phone and started filming. Intuition? I initially thought that a fight was going to start and I thought it’d be important to get evidence? Whatever, I rotated my phone to landscape mode (very important) and hit record. I’d turned the corner at the St Mary’s St crossroads so I had to turn around and head back to the mile. And then I saw it. About ten blokes sat in a line in the middle of the road. With the cones and barriers behind them for protection. They were encouraging people to come and join them. But not to sit in the line. Oh no.

One by one they ran in, like planes gliding in to land at an airport. And then, just as the wheels crossed the runway threshold... up they lept. The meatplanes were carried towards their non-existent arrival gate by lift generated from the arms of the people below. Onwards they travelled towards the back of the line where they were met by two guys helping people back to their feet. It was lovely work. There was music, sounding from the portable speaker of another member of the group.

Eventually there was a man who pulled his trousers down. Because there always is. He dived onto the line with great enthusiasm and was sent on his way aloft a sea of fingers.

And then I hit stop. Because what can top that? I typed a quick message into Twitter, selected the video, and fired it off into the ether. And then I put my phone back into my pocket, for this was a 2 minute + file. I set off towards to my destination just around the corner, with a tale and a video to entertain my friend.

Part two, as it were

45 minutes later I’m back on the street and wanting to get home. I get out my phone to check for buses and notice that my Twitter client has 20+ notifications. That’s a lot. For me, anyway.

60 RTs in the first hour. A few hundred after that. Then a steady flow of hundreds of likes and RTs per hour. It got utterly ridiculous. It didn’t stop all night and I noticed an odd side effect: my Twitter client kept locking up as new notifications came in, sometimes for 30 seconds at a time. No buttons or scrolling would work at all.

The first time I knew something had gone a bit nuts was later that evening when I got a message from a couple of local Edinburgh blogs. I said they could use the video because they were local and I was hoping it’d bring a smile to people’s faces. I also wanted the sweet tweet stats - I won’t lie. Then a sports website. I had to look into the background of them to see that they weren’t owned by pricks. Turns out they weren’t, so I said yes to them too.

Then a nice chap from Unilad messaged me. I was a bit apprehensive about it because of their past, but it turns out that they’ve really had a change this past few years. I think they have new owners, and their direction is much different. Fuck it, I said yes.

By the end of the first night I was at 4,000+ RTs and I went to a bed with a phone that would barely respond.

Morning didn’t bring any relief. Hundreds more notifications the next day - I finally turned off the badge notifications in iOS. Didn’t do much for my Twitter client, mind. It was only two days later when things died down that I could actually use it properly.

At lunchtime on the Sunday I got a message from a nice chap at Storyful. They feed stories to loads of different clients. I said “yes” - by this stage I was enjoying the fame. What I should have said was “what clients?” The Storyful chap rattled off a list of clients including The Sun. No thanks. I’m from the North of England. Solidarity and all that... He promised that he’d make sure it didn’t go to them, I said yes, and then that was it. I was pretty happy.

Finally, later that night I was contacted by the Press Association. THE PRESS ASSOCIATION!! With the major UK broadcasters as clients!
Yes, go for it says I... and then I started doing something that’s always guaranteed to bring me back down to Earth: thinking.

I started wondering if I hadn’t said yes a little too freely to everything. What if I had tried to get money for the video? Only problem is that loads of folk had already seen it by now. Probably no point. The Scottish papers (The Scotsman and the local Edinburgh Evening News - both owned by the same company, apparently) had picked it up. And I’d said yes to a significant amount of the media outlets that exist. The big ones anyway. The only thing I could really do was to chuck it up on YouTube and turn on monetisation.
I ended up finding a few copies on YouTube already. Fuck that, my video! I was getting high on the power. I filed two DMCA takedowns on the spot. 7,000 RTs, 15,000 likes. It’d been a good day. A noticeable increase in my ability to use Twitter. Things were slowing down.

Part three, you might say

Monday morning. I’d had a few messages of surprise from people at work, and as soon as I got in a few people were going “oh here he is, Mr Viral” and other stuff like that. It was a bit awkward. This is the time when the feelings of being out of control come back. I heard people talking about it in staff rooms and then quickly avoided them.

On the media front I had two messages that really surprised me. One was from a nice lady at STV asking if they could use the footage on STV2 that night. One was from a woman at ABC News. The one in America. Apparently she worked for Good Morning America! I would have loved to have said yes to them both, but before that something else had come up.

Firstly my two DMCA takedowns went through, so the competition was gone. I could keep control of things from here on out.

Secondly I received an email from someone at Unilad, which was surprising. They wanted to know if Unilad could licence the video for exclusive distribution. I didn’t really know what this meant. I emailed back and asked what he was talking about and whether the fact that I’d said yes to the other guys would make a difference.

Basically the other outlets were asking for non-exclusive use. I hadn’t signed anything, they were asking casually, and they weren’t preventing me from going to other outlets. What Unilad were offering was exclusive rights to control commercial use of the video. They’d publish it on their channels, offer it to other clients for a fee, do all the admin, that kind of thing. 60/40 in my favour. By this stage I did feel quite bad that I hadn’t made any money. This socialist got greedy.

I was already doing well for new followers, which isn’t important to me but is nice I suppose. I also got a bit of side traffic to the local group that I run (Edinburgh Skeptics). Which at the moment is very nice, believe me. But I could do with money. Who couldn’t? And maybe the moment had passed, but if I could make a bit of cash by sitting on my arse while someone else does all the work, why shouldn’t I? He faxed over a contract and I eagerly signed it.

So I got to tell STV and ABC to contact Unilad... and as soon as I said it they didn’t really seem that interested anymore. Which kinda hurt a bit! Was I damaging my own happiness at doing something that made people happy and got me 15 mins of fame for some filthy cash? Yes, yes I was. I honestly didn’t think that it was going to go anywhere anyway - my phone was completely usable again - so I thought I may as well. It’s not like I had to do anything.

Another downside to the day was that a colleague of mine sent me a link that morning from... THE SUN! The Scottish Sun, to be more accurate, but The Sun nonetheless. I was livid. 30 minutes later the story had disappeared due to “legal reasons”... curious.

Turns out the journalist at The Scottish Sun had had a bit of a comms error with Storyful. The fact that I hadn't given The Sun permission had passed everyone by. These things happen. The journalist himself was absolutely lovely about it and I had no hard feelings at all. I was quite angry for a bit but there wasn't much point letting it get to me.

And that, on Monday night is where the story ends. Sort of.

Part four, I believe

It’s the week after I filmed the video and I can finally take stock of everything that happened. The reach of this thing was incredible. My mum’s boyfriend back home in Blackpool had seen it and didn’t realise it was me. I lost count of how many people were telling the world why this made them proud to be Scottish or why Edinburgh was one of the world’s great cities. People saying they wanted to come back here soon and experience the atmosphere for themselves.

My YouTube clip has had just over 3,000 views and has netted me $0.11. 11 cents. Missed the boat, didn’t I? (Edit: a week later and it’s $0.96 after the video was posted on what appears to be a fairly popular Polish web forum which netted me almost 45,000 views).

I've seen what other people did with their videos and they appeared to put them straight up onto YouTube instead of attaching it to a tweet. That way you get the traffic and the ad revenue. I'll know for next time. See, that's the thing. Edinburgh is a big city and a lot of stuff happens in it. It is not totally beyond the realms of possibility that this could happen again. I'll certainly be trying to make it happen, anyway.

But yes, the one thing I've learnt from this (if anything) is to keep control of the video - if you think you have something decent put it up on YouTube right away. Put a little bit in the description saying that nobody can use it without contacting you first. Turn on ads. Then you can issue DMCA requests using that as evidence.

I honestly don't know if signing a contract with Unilad was the right idea. Turns out that people just don't want to pay for something if you've already let other people use it. I really did miss the boat, but you don't think about that at the time. You just want the sweet tweet ratios.

And that's basically everything. Thanks for reading this. It was long and unnecessary.
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