 I was asked to talk about video and social media this morning. And I was thinking a lot about, what does that mean, social media? I mean, obviously it means Facebook and social networking websites. But in a lot of ways, when it comes to video, really what you're talking about is distribution. Distribution platforms. How do you reach your audience? And I think I can speak to that basically through the experiences of the projects I've worked on, both at Spike and then with the Raps. And then some other things I've sort of observed as I've been thinking about ways to just be more effective at getting these creations of ours out into the world and having them seen and shared and talked about. So today I'm going to show you a couple things and then we can open it up for discussion and talk about them. The first is I was the creative director at Spike and in the last several years, I oversaw their big award shows. So one of them was the Scream Awards. Has anybody seen the Scream Awards or heard of it? Nobody watches a award show, so it made a challenge. Some of you might have seen this piece, though. I did a shot-for-shot recreation of the original Back to the Future theatrical trailer. Now Back to the Future is my favorite movie of all time. And that's going to play a lot into why I think this succeeded, but also having Michael J. Fox in it helped a little bit. So I'm going to show you that and we're going to talk about how that unfolded. Another campaign that I oversaw was the promotion of the Video Game Awards, which maybe some of you have at least heard of. Also a problematic show because video games are mainly about being played, not being watched, or watching people talking about them, which is even more derivative than watching them played or watching footage. But so we launched a campaign called Look Closer as part of the 2010 Video Game Awards. And it had a lot of success, particularly at the community, sort of digital community level in forums and Facebook and then the media layer above that, the blogs and news outlets that cover video game news. Talk about that. Of course, the Keynes vs. Hyacrap videos. But if it was just them, it would really be one data point. So it's a little hard to jump for joy about that. And then there's some other websites, video brands that I've been paying attention to, that I think offer some really good lessons that are somewhat, I think, repeatable. Because I don't think there's a lot that's repeatable about social media. Because at the end of the day, what is social media? Social media is really just a set of web tools that let us talk to each other. So there isn't a thing, social media, that can really be programmatically addressed or have some kind of formula applied to it that's going to work. It's no different than, well, how do you get people to talk about you? That's really all you're saying. And so there's a lot of ways that we can do it and a lot of the ways that people have always done that still apply. And so that's going to be the lessons that I've learned so far about this process of trying to bridge the gap, move from sort of old media to new media, old media, so to speak. Having worked in the networks for a decade and now moving, and even while in the network over the past three years, the focus moving increasingly to these connected social platforms, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et cetera. So I also added a lot more whizbang transitions to the presentation today so we can enjoy those. So here is the Back to the Future trailer. So that's kind of my favorite thing ever. I don't really get all excited about celebrities, but that time I definitely did. It was really neat. Now he was actually filmed in a hotel room on the Upper East Side, so the entire, he was not actually there on the set. The reflections I had to add in Adobe After Effects. And one other little fun thing for me is the feet at the beginning are me. There was no reason for it to be me other than I was geeking out on it and I wanted it to be me. It was like only I know the pacing of that. So during the concepting of that piece, which wasn't my original idea, the head writer at Spike found that trailer and said, oh, we should do something with this trailer. And then he started, you know, because we all tend to want to make something new coming up with all these different script ideas for something we could do. And I don't even remember what they were, but as soon as I saw it, my instant thought was we have to do an exact frame by frame recreation of this. And it has to be exactly the same. And that little detail proved to be very important. And I think how it was perceived and picked up. But it was a detail that everybody else thought, what does it really need to be exactly the same? Nobody's gonna remember this trailer. You know, I honestly hadn't even seen it before. So in that respect, they were definitely right. There was really no reason in a way to do it exactly the same. Just for it to kind of evoke the trailer would have probably been good enough in a sense. But because I was a real geek about Back to the Future and I was so excited about it and wanted to really like pay tribute to it as best I could, it was very important. I mean, we spent so much time on the placement of the reflection before the hand comes in. And those type of little details. And I think that played in a very important role. And I think being a geek about stuff plays a very important role in how you find an audience in a world where you're both broadcasting. Which is actually another thing about sort of the Facebook addition to what used to be just comments is the feed. You're actually, we're all broadcasters now. And narrow casting, which is now you can also talk directly to people. And target people directly and they have direct access to you. And that's very different. That's one of the things that's so different about the digital space is that intimacy. So some of the things, now some of these things benefit dramatically from having a press department at Viacom. So some of these are not repeatable. The getting featured on entertainment tonight. That was actually mostly the press department. However, that wouldn't have guaranteed and I don't think necessarily got seen by enough people to do what happened next, which is over 48 hours, it got over two and a half million views. I might be misremembering that. That might have actually been three and a half million. Unfortunately, because Viacom has had an outstanding and I think it's still going on lawsuit with YouTube. YouTube pulled the clip off. Within that first weekend, which I won't get into it, but it just speaks to sort of the odd bedfellows that intellectual property in the 21st century presents and the challenges of communicating and even when you own the content, getting it out there. So going back to this shot for shot precision, and I was hoping this would happen because it would sort of prove my case and it did, which was people started reposting it with side-by-side picture-in-picture to be like, look, it's exactly the same. And we're so excited about that and so excited about that attention to detail and you could see it in the comments and multiple people took the time to find the old one to download it into whatever little editing app they might be using and then repost it with it side-by-side. Like that's actually work. It might have taken like an hour and a half for somebody to do for no reason other than they're geeking out on it. And then it got picked up very broadly. So here's just a little example of that side-by-side recreation. So it's not exact because on our side on the left it was a studio, not a real open space so we had to adjust the camera because if we made the camera any lower to make that shot look closer to the truth we would have seen the back wall, which irks me because I really wanted to be exactly the same. So what were my, what are the key takeaways from what I observed with this? And the other thing too is we'd been talking about how are we gonna make something go viral? And one of the smartest people at Spike who just left always used to say viral is not a strategy, it's an outcome. Saying I want something to go viral is not a goal other than the goal of, I want it to be good and lots of people to see it. Like that's not a goal, it's like I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do something that sucks and nobody watches. Like that's not a goal, it's not a strategy, it's an outcome. And it's surprising, and again this is, I'm speaking mainly from being inside a big media firm trying to grapple with getting their stuff seen. And they're facing the same things that we all face as we try to get our ideas out there. It's very hard to find stuff in a world with millions and millions of options and billions of video views happening every day in a stream that's always pushing you off the front page constantly, daily. And I've said a lot of times in the past several years that now distribution is now free, which means that each of us can get as many views as MTV or Disney or Viacom or Paramount or any of the biggest players in the world. Can't really monetize it the way they can, but we can still reach an audience and that's something completely new. But it hasn't, in some senses, lowered the true cost, the full price of reaching those people because it's so much harder to be discovered. Back in the days when there was three networks, that barrier to entry was also involved, there was only three networks and people liked watching television. So you were basically guaranteed tens of millions, perhaps even close to 100 million viewers for your program. And we can thank the FCC for being that way for so long. Great job they did with all that anti-corporate regulation. But even though we can now compete with those guys directly, we have a hard time being discovered. I saw how many awesome videos have you seen that have like under a thousand views that they're like, they're good. It's like, how does this, how did this not get discovered? Discovery is the new distribution. Where worrying about getting distributed was the thing, how am I gonna get my film distributed? Now, how's anybody gonna find it? So it's really like the price has moved off to another margin. But we can still do it and that's a giant leap for everybody. So a big part of this was leveraging an existing fan base. I mean, you know, and me being a back to the future geek assumed there'd be millions of people that would love this and anything about back to the future. And it was the 25th anniversary so that we also had sort of a cultural zeitgeist slash heavy marketing effort going on. Not just at Spike, but the movie studio is part of a DVD re-release and stuff like that. But I was surprised how many people at the network thought like, well, this movie was like 30 years old or 25 years old and nobody's gonna, do people really care about this? I mean, I wasn't even sure if the EVP of events, the person that ran the show, she might not have even seen the movie, which is even more horrifying for me. But they weren't sure that it was gonna happen, that it would get as much excitement as it did. And that is sort of surprising, but I think it also just speaks to the power of communities and communities in this new sense where it's not a community by geography, it's a community by interest. And everybody in this room is part of that. Anybody that likes Austrian economics is part of a community of interest that's obviously incredibly passionate and dispersed and excited for anything cool that comes out about it. Featuring a celebrity helped a lot. No question about it, not easy for people to do. So that's a high barrier to entry for using that technique. But when you can, it's really helpful. And yeah, being authentically geeky. So it's not just, I think yesterday I talked about how when I was at Nickelodeon, we used to say we can't say fun, we have to be fun and show actual fun happening. And similarly, you can't say, I'm gonna make something for the geeks. It's about as terrible as saying, I'm gonna make something that the kids like. There's no, you have no hope. If those words come out of your mouth, I'm gonna make something that the kids like, you are not the person that's gonna make something that the kids like. It's just not gonna be you. Because the creative process is such that ultimately you're making all these little decisions. And if you are not sort of of that world, your sensibilities are not likely to produce something that will feel authentic to those viewers. In some sense, now there's people that can be atypical. You can look at them and say, like, I don't know how they made this amazing thing that's so in depth into this subject. But they geeked out on it. I guarantee you that. You have to geek out on stuff and really dig in deep to reach that sort of authenticity that I think is important in this new age. And I think again, it comes back to the narrow casting community aspect of social media, which is that we're seeing the coolest parts of free market economics at work. The power of reputation is so on display in a world where you're discovering most of the things you watch by way of your friends and what they do and say, and that sort of vote of confidence is so important and it's not something you can capture. And it's not something media buys, placing lots of ads can reproduce. It's too easy to ignore ads, which Facebook is finding out. So the next one I wanna talk about is this video game awards campaign we did called Look Closer. So one smart thing Spike did about video game awards was they switched it from being a bunch of people coming up and talking about accepting an award to basically in a video version of a mini E3 conference where they would show 10 to 12 trailers for games that haven't yet come out. So they made it about content. And that was a big step forward and we could see the difference in the way the show was being talked about at least within the trades. The ratings never moved a lot but the way it was received out into the community, out into the blog, the blogosphere. And when you looked at forums and looked at the way people were talking about it that were interested in games, that the tone began to shift. So all of the advertising became built around that, became built around, you're gonna see these amazing, never before seen premieres. And that was pretty effective. So one of the things we said is okay, well the problem of course is that you don't have to watch the show for that because they'll all be on YouTube within like 20 minutes of it being done broadcasting. So how can we add a little carrot to watch the show? How can we drive interest in the show itself and create that as a destination, a time slot that people might actually wanna care about a little bit more rather than just being like blasted with, you know, Sunday at nine, eight central, only on Spike. And so one of the ways, things we came up with was to bury essentially eight, I think it was an 11th teaser within the promos. And so we actually created a tagline for the campaign called Look Closer, which was really flat footed but it worked. And it was just saying, literally look closer at this promo because there's hidden stuff in it. That's really, and the hidden stuff in it were a sequence of complicated, though not complicated enough in my opinion, clues and breadcrumbs to point you towards something. So, you know, there was a few frames of a QR code which is that little square there. And when you, you know, if you're not familiar with those, they're basically like a barcode, modern barcode, but they can contain more data. And phone readers can, you know, pick them up if you've got a camera on your phone and then they can take you usually to a link. And so when it took you to the link, you would see this little mobile site on the right and these came out four times and the first one just had the word murder, look closer, murder. And another thing buried in the spot was this image. And we were working with Activision who was providing this content and it was for the promotion of one of their new titles, a big sort of sequel title for them. So, yeah, so you would basically copy and as it went through, the three formed murder your maker. And then I forget actually what the fourth one did but it basically wrapped it up, showed murderyourmaker.com and then, you know, when people went there they found this sort of cryptic website and because you can't really see who that is or which character that might be, that sparked, each time it came out it sparked a whole debate. And we hadn't seen this type of sort of engagement with Spike within gaming blogs and essentially, and this world of people who actively talk about gaming on the web before. And I think that that was a real signal of success that we were reaching people and making them excited about the show but also that they cared enough. And I think the effort of the complexity sort of was a signal and it was a signal that we were trying to, we were making an effort. I actually wanted it to be IP address numbers. So I didn't want it to be words, I wanted it to be four IP address numbers and the brass was like, that's too complicated. But, you know, the other funny thing about these type of campaigns and when you think about media and the kinds of things you can do, video is only one part of all sorts of tools at our disposal. And we can tell stories now that literally bridge between the screen and reality and real locations and there's just, the sky's the limit with what we can do and how we can tell our stories. And when it comes to something like this, I mean, it only takes one person to post the IP address and have it be hyperlinked. So it's really like, it's hard to trick the crowd. And that was the point I was trying to make. The more complicated it'll be, it really was just a signaling mechanism. The more it will encourage this group of people who we see are excited about this content, excited about gaming, want to see that we're excited that we really put all the work in to making it this circuitous process. But I think we've still got a lot farther than, I thought we might have at the outset. So I think that was a successful campaign. And in the show, so it all pushed towards the show and in the show it was revealed that it was this game prototype two. And again, the whole idea, the strategy wasn't to go viral, because that's not a strategy. But the strategy was to make the show a point in time that could be sort of like a water cooler moment. Something that people are excited enough about that they'll want to see it when it happens. Like, one of the few things in media now that can still do that is sports. You know, you want to watch it live. You don't really want to watch a game, DVR, even though, you know, people do. But that sense of urgency is a very hard thing to try to create. And that hasn't gotten any easier with social media. So again, it's in the impacts, as I talked about, is that the gaming press really ran with it, which was pretty cool, because we were entering kind of hostile territory. They were skeptical of the brand. Didn't, you know, we were coming from a position of not having a lot of sort of credibility within the sort of community. And this helped build it. And it was because we geeked out, which is again, the theme I'm going to come back to again and again. We geeked out on it. And that made a difference. You know, and gamers talked about it. And, you know, it contributed to increased respect for the show in material of how effective it was at driving views. And the funny thing just from a business standpoint of the way these shows worked is they're driven by integrated marketing. So even if the ratings weren't great, the fact that the show is being talked about for that entire promotional period, while all the various game developers that were part of the promotion were getting some messages out, was of value for them. So even in our sort of, when we try to imagine entrepreneurially, the business model of media is more diverse, more complicated, and often more indirect than it would seem. So here's just a couple of sites that picked it up. And these were not paid editorials. These were, these just happened. And there was a lot more. So yeah, I think again, these key themes reemerge. You know, an activated fan base, a group of people, a community, and you're not, you're targeting that community, but hopefully because you're of that community, you want to talk to them. You know, the complexity as a signal, which really ultimately was about, again, being authentically geeky about your subject, geeking out. And nothing is more of a geek out than the Keynes vs. Hyatt rap videos. On paper, these are obviously kind of a ridiculous concept. It's two dead economists. Most of, you know, most Americans, most people on the planet don't know who either of them are. They're going to rap, which if you say in advance, it almost, you would almost, you would rightfully assume it's gonna be cheesy. Right? In fact, when Russ would talk to his peers about it, which is admittedly, maybe not the optimal group, to float this idea and get a little sort of advanced feedback, they were like, this is, really? Okay, and you're part of it? But it wouldn't have been much better if I was saying it. I mean, my ringtone is rapper's delight. Not exactly the coolest cat in the room when it comes to music. Ask Michael Malus. But it worked. So there's, and it wasn't cheesy. It was fun, and it was honest. And that's because we really geeked out on this. And there was a set of decisions that were both strategic and aesthetic for me. And I think, I say that for me, because I think Russ could have probably gone either way on some of these things, since the video, the look and feel of it was very much sort of my territory. And a big part of that is the fact that they're not really a satire, which I'll talk about in a little bit. So here's some stats about Fear the Boomin' Bust. So it's up to three and a half million views. And that doesn't include the reposts. There's been a lot of repostings. I think there's at least a half million more in just repostings of the video, which is really good for what this is, but it's not enormous by web standards. I mean, there's dramatically less, in my view, important stories being told that get dramatically more views than this, as we all know. But I think within the context of what this is and the subject matter and what's been done up to this point, I think this was a really solid success. It's been voluntarily translated into over 12 languages, which you saw, if you saw the talk yesterday, you know, it was mentioned in the video I showed about it. And that's this other thing that's really interesting about this world that we now live in where you're broadcasting and the feedback isn't just people making comments. It's derivations. You're mashing things up. You're reposting, you're posting video responses. And that level of engagement is both really interesting and a real opportunity to connect with people, but it also is just a sign of how much this new world favors being a geek. And I mean geek in the broadest sense, being really passionate about a subject to the point where you engage in it for the sake of engaging in it, because you love it. So another very interesting thing about these is they're very dense lyrics in English and yet half of all the views have come from outside the United States. And there was no thought on our part put into the distribution or if there had been, we would have put actual captions in different languages embedded in it and instead of other people having to do that for us. And I don't know how much that would have cost, but we didn't even think about doing that. We didn't even think about putting it in Spanish, which was really kind of dumb. But we were doing something again because it was our passion, because we had something we wanted to talk about that we thought was important and that you would record some of Russ and I's conversations as we were writing and rewriting it. There's just a lot of giggling going on the whole time. And if you're an econ talk listener, Russ has got the funniest laugh. I mean, mine's goofier, but it's just as warm. I have a lot of real warmth for the whole process because we just really enjoyed everything about it. So another thing that's really surprising to me, especially during summers, if you think maybe a lot of this is coming from schools, few of the boom and bustle gets about 2,500 views every single day and it's so stable, I don't understand why that's happening. I mean, the stability of it is remarkable. It's like, sometimes it'll go up, it'll rarely go below 2,500, but each and every day, 2,500 people see this, watch this thing. And we're not doing anything with it. We're not promoting it or anything. It's baffling to me. And it's also like, it's not like it's some newspaper, some hub is picking it up and then you're seeing some kind of spike. It is like a flat line. You're gonna see some of the graphs coming up next. But before I move on to some more stats, because what I wanted to do with these was really talk about the statistics of it to the extent that I have access to them with the YouTube, the way everything unfolded on YouTube, where views came from and how the trajectory of it went. Because it's, I think it's interesting and it's sort of a good case study. And since we have two of them and there's a remarkable amount of similarity in the way the two spread and were shared and the distribution between mobile and off of YouTube with embeds, which would be something like Facebook, people like sharing it on Facebook, versus on YouTube itself. It suggests that there are ways in which if we wanna try to build an online brand, whether it's for your organization or just for yourself and you wanna basically create a new TV show on the web, that there is a certain sustainability that you can build. And there's some techniques, I think, and when I get, as I move ahead, that appear to be useful techniques. I will equivocate a lot on this because it's changing so rapidly. Each part of this process and each step that I don't think there's any expertise in it to be had. It's all on a case by case basis. It's all a question of what you're trying to say and what's the best way to say that. And there's just no cookie cutter formula. There's no sitcom for the web. There's no model like that that I think you can really adhere to. Anybody that says they know it, I think is selling snake oil. They're like macro-economists. So here's the path to a million views. So that first week, was pretty incredible. Now, we still, even with these, we had great advantages that if you just put aside a video up cold, it would be great to get and it's not easy to get. And that is like Russ had great friends at NPR and they ran a story that ended up going on the air on all things considered over the radio. That's 12 million listeners on day one. You know, that's not something that's easy to come by. But at the same time, I'm not sure how, I mean, that played an important role, no question about it. But to get, I think it's 136,000 people in the second day, I don't know how many, it's such a difficult thing to imagine someone listening to the radio or even if it's in a podcast form and taking action later. This was always the hard thing with Spike. And just with the networks in general, getting someone to take action in the future with this silly little message you've got that's one of a million things that they don't care about that you're shoving out of. But it most certainly helped. So it took eight days to cross half a million. And then it took a month, I'm sorry, two months to actually make it to a million. So the rate of fall off is very quick. And in terms of strategy, I think that does suggest that when you, when you've worked really hard on a video and you wanna get it out there and it's something that's a priority for you, it's worth it to think about what are the ways you can get it out there quickly in that first week. It's a little bit of an opening weekend kind of moment. And fight of the century follows a very similar path. But at the same time, I don't think that's a general rule because there are things that build with overtime and a kind of attrition. And it does depend, but our experience with these suggests that it's worth it to say, well, how many other places, who can I get this in front of and reach out to them? Say, I made this, what do you think? Can you, would you share it with people? And a lot of sort of strategists of social media talk about influencers and people on Twitter that others respect that can push a message out to their followers and to their email lists. And that's just a very new version of buying advertising. Only the currency at this point is much more about coolness and geek credibility than buying it. But that's still a currency that you have to earn and build and that's a challenge because part of these communities now is they're built on reputation. And they know, they're very acutely aware, people are in the space of how easy it is to destroy your reputation by shilling. So again, it just comes back to the geeking out and being authentic to what you're doing is I think a very, very important part of how you communicate in a world where people can reach out to you. So, Fight of the Century followed a remarkable, a remarkably similar path and when you think about it, there was no reason for Fight of the Century to succeed. It's a sequel that basically is replaying something that, you know, if you looked at the first one, you'd say, well, this is a novelty because it's so weird. But novelty and weird wears off when you do it again. So, you know, that was a real honest concern. Like, is this gonna be something that it comes out of the gate and it basically is only hardcore fans of Hayek that watch it and it, you know, within a week that's end of story? And what is that gonna look like? You know, and is there gonna be the same amount of media attention given the amount of overlap? Now, it is a different story and, you know, partly strategically, but mostly because I like to make stuff look really as awesome as possible, we tried to up the ante visually and musically and creatively and I think we succeeded in that and I think that definitely helped. But there's an interesting part of that too, which we'll get to in a bit. So, you know, Fight of the Century is one year younger than Fear the Boomin' Bust, but up to date it's had 1.8 million views. Again, half of them are outside of the US. So, again, I find that just remarkable and it's the thing I never could have imagined. This was, for me, on a personal level, this is so much more exciting, not just because of how much I love and care about these ideas and how important I think they are for our future, for my son's future, versus civilization. But, you know, women make stuff on Spike and Nickelodeon and MTV that millions of people would see, but it just wasn't, it didn't have the same feel, like as a creative person to have made this yourself. Now, it wasn't myself, there was a lot of people, but to not have it been basically handed to you and then distributed it on somebody else's machinery, but to have it succeed in this way is so fulfilling. And, you don't need to get a million views to have that, be the case. If you get a thousand views, think about how amazing it is to make something yourself and have a thousand people you don't know all around the world see it. Like, that is miraculous. That is a marvel. And I think we take it for granted now, but it is one of the most amazing things of the past hundred years. It's a new printing press. And I've come to really believe that I think video is the pamphlet of the 21st century. And we can do it now. And in a way, the reason, partly because people like to watch things, but I think also video does offer, you know, it is harder to do than writing in a logistical sense. Creatively writing is a very big challenge. It takes a lot of work. And the shorter it is, the harder it is. But the resources and the people that go into making a video is a way to separate what you're talking about from all the blogs and comments and chatter. And that's gonna continue to be the case. It's never gonna be free from a time and resource standpoint to create great content. So it's always going to be a chance for me to get a message out in a way that's different from writing a blog post, doing a Facebook post, and commenting a lot of which I've done all of those things, mostly wastefully in my opinion, at least for me. So it also has this remarkably stable 2000 or so views a day. Now what's interesting is that fight of the century, even though in many ways I think it's got broader message, it's got a broader story and looks better, it is not as popular as fear the boom and bust on an ongoing basis. And I'm not sure why that is. My guess is that fear the boom and bust because it's covering so much more of like, it's even geekier than fight of the century. Fight of the century covers this kind of historical, philosophical arc about the role of government as hop down versus bottom up in history. But fear the boom and bust digs into Austrian business like a theory point by point. And so that's like super geeking out. And I also think that the macro aspects of it, even on the first half, the Keynesian model is more applicable to students and what they're learning in an intro class. So I think there's some forces at work that keep fear the boom and bust more popular. But at this point, it's not about which one came first because the average new viewer's not really gonna care about that out of the gate, seeing either one. It's just an interesting quirk of what's come about with these two things. And yeah, so it's been slightly less popular in the long run than fear the boom and bust. But so now look at the graph on its path to a million views. Pretty similar to fear the boom and bust. It had a much higher, it had a significantly higher peak. And I think you can attribute that to the fact that it wasn't coming out of nowhere. This was the second one. And I had put out on Facebook, on the Econ Stories Facebook page that it was coming and tried to build anticipation for it. And that I think played a role. And that is gonna come to I think another very important trend I've noticed that successful video content on the web tends to leverage consistency, which we have not done. And we've only done two of these. They still are in the realm of being a labor of love. But I think if you wanna build a real audience, you have to consistently deliver for them. And some of the examples I'm gonna show you do that. But this, I think this first day out of the gate demonstrates how having people already know about what you're doing, having established a fan base for your work is really important. It crossed 500,000 views in seven days and one million in two months and 10 days. So when you actually look at these two things side by side, it is remarkable how similar their trajectory is. They were at least one year apart. And they are these singular kind of one-off moments. So again, it's only two data points. So we can maybe hop for joy a little bit. But it does suggest a way in which these things tend to find an audience and then find a sort of water level. So here's some more statistics. Oh, let me see. So where are they watching? So you can see that it's a mix. There actually is a surprisingly high amount of people that are seeing it directly on the YouTube page. But right below that is embedded views. So a good portion of the people that are discovering this are seeing it, embedded on blogs, shared on Facebook. And then mobile devices and the channel page come up as a tiny portion. Although mobile has grown a lot and it grew a lot when you look at it in the first week in the first month. So it is being distributed. People are finding it through their friends in large measure and that's just an amazing thing. I don't really know how you can sustain that, how you can make that happen. I don't think you can make it happen other than some of these trends in the way we wanna talk about stuff and consistency and authenticity. That's the singular thing I think that I've come away with watching all these different campaigns. If it's really smart or funny or authentic, I think you've got the best chance possible. So yeah, these key elements are, as I've said, it's a very activated fan base. I mean, maybe the only fan base more rabid than Apple fans is Austrian economics fans. And I remember the first time I had to do anything like this and speak in front of a group was at the Mises Institute and the jokes that flew in that crowd were really something else, I have to say. Yeah, gold standard jokes and rapping. Really, you really know you're targeting a niche. You can make a joke about how rap is perfect for Austrian economics because they're on the gold standard. You know? Ha! Still works! So mainstream media support was a big help and obviously that's great. The mainstream media is not dead. It is the long part of that tale. It's the peak. And I think it's a good thing to target if possible to think about like, is this good enough or is this funny enough to be on television? It's still a useful way to go about things. We still have radio. So the talk of the death of television has been greatly exaggerated. We still have radio. We still have AM radio with people on it that are doing shows. It's not just for emergency broadcast. I think for us, high production value played a very important role. And also taking the content seriously. It's not a parody. It's not meant to be goofy or funny even though there's a humorous aspect to both of them. But they aren't really funny in seeking to make people laugh sense. Just the notion of rapping economists is funny and the fact that it is taken seriously is this kind of ironic humor. But fundamentally they're not like comedy pieces except for Mike Munger at the beginning. They are geeky, as I've said. No question about it. And the authenticity of them I think is baked into that geekiness. The attention to the economics and the details of the economic arguments that are being made and in a sense the sophistication of what's being done. By not dumbing it down, by not trying to make entirely ideological or very broad brush arguments but dig into the details, I think one of the benefits that comes with that is credibility and authenticity. It shows you put in the time. It's a kind of signal. And I think a lot of people that wanna get a message out in organizations and especially the larger the organization the more established, the more conservative they're going to be about this, they don't want it to be too hard to understand. And we made no effort to make this easy to understand in a sense. Like all of these, these things are designed to be difficult in a way. They're lyrically dense. They're covering very complex subjects. Those subjects leverage arcane terminology that even we often struggle to make sure we even understand what they mean. And again, I think this ultimately ends up speaking back to that aspirational that wanting to be smarter, wanting to learn more and seeing something that's giving you a window into that I think is a powerful thing. And we shouldn't shirk from that. We shouldn't be afraid to put a word in front of people that they don't, that the average person doesn't know because it's an opportunity for them to learn. And I think most people are curious. So I think it's worth doing. Don't be afraid to do it. Now, another thing from a strategic standpoint that I noticed as far as informing future strategy is the way in which having the hit video really does, it sort of lifts all boats. So we also posted, and this was very much a labor of love on my part just because I am geeking out about this stuff all the time, about 45 minutes of interview with Larry White and Robert Skidelsky. Now, I love Larry White. He's not exactly the first guy you think of as TV. He is, but he's awesome. And he's one of the clearest expositors of these ideas and probably one of the best, if not the best, economist in the Hayek tradition alive from a macroeconomics and money sense. And each of those videos has gotten between 45 and 60,000 views. Now, when you compare that to the average sort of talking head video, it's pretty amazing. And I think that is directly the result of being associated and under the umbrella with these giant videos. And so as a strategy, and I realize most of you in here are students, but I think as a strategy for organizations, investing in creating a really awesome piece, a really high quality piece doesn't have to be a one off. It in a sense is advertising for the entire brand and your entire sort of stable content. So let's look to some other web successes that I think, and this is probably mostly confirmation bias on my part, if not entirely, but it's the best I can do. I have a theory and I'm going to confirm it. Like a good macroeconomist. So one that I really look at a lot is this YouTube channel by a guy named Freddie Wong. Have any of you seen Freddie Wong's YouTube videos? Okay, a couple. So basically every single week, he puts up a new video about that's making use of sort of game culture and they're humorous, they're little stories, they're satirical and they're really high quality. They use lots of special effects and a lot of sort of graphic sort of comic violence with guns and action battles. He's created 3.3 million subscribers, it's enormous. He's had in total over 650 million views. I mean this small team is, I think that might've been me. This small team is beating the networks with weekly views and part of that is because he targets gamers, which really, again, speaks to how important in a world where geography isn't the community, but interest is that being a geek is important and being able to be of the community of geeks and being able to speak in the language to your peers is a very peer-to-peer world we live in. That weekly, every week that consistency, if we could do that, my hat is off to the guys at Learn Liberty because they've surpassed us, they've surpassed our rap videos in total views for their channel and they've done so, in my opinion, not just because the videos are quality and because they've got great content in them but because they're consistently delivering delivering them week after week. And I think that's just enormously important. It just seems to be a very consistent feature of successful sort of new media video channels. A lot of themes seem to recur, comedy, absurdity and I think high quality. High quality is starting to, I think more and more be a differentiator. This notion that you just put whatever you want up and quality doesn't matter anymore is a very fad-like thought process. People like stuff that looks great. I mean, we're not gonna all want to watch handheld video. We like stuff like lost. Lost is awesome. So yeah, he exceeds 1 million views every single week and most of the time it's a lot more than that. And I just think that it's a pretty amazing feat and an opportunity. So the next one is sort of in a similar vein and these two guys actually end up I think sort of sometimes cross pollinating between each other. How many of you have seen Epic Meal Time? Okay, so more. So Epic Meal Time is interesting because it's the definition of the geekdom here is not as narrow in a sense. I mean, to say gamers is kind of ridiculous because it's probably 150 million people in the United States. It's just everybody games in a sense and it's very, very popular. It's not, I mean, when my buddy Josh and I used to go to Blockbuster and when I was in high school and we'd be grabbing like Super Mario Brothers 3 and we'd see some girls and be like, what are you guys getting? Oh, I'm just getting like a movie. I don't know. I mean, it was just, you know, I don't know whether that feeling of stigma was justified or not, I mean, it kind of was. But I think that year is over. I think everybody games and it's not, it's when I say gamers, that's not really a narrow niche, but it is an interest. It is defined. It is a subset. It's not just people 18 to 24 or 18 to 49. Like it's, there is a shared interest. There's a shared language and culture that is part of that. And that in a way is where the geekdom and the community comes in. So he has 2.5 million subscribers. So let me just describe what this is. It's a group of Canadians. I saw them talk at South by Southwest. The guy's a former school teacher and the main guy calls himself Muscles Glasses. And they literally go to the supermarket. They buy as much meat as they can. They go home and they cook it. And as they're cooking it, they scream what they're cooking. Bacon, more bacon, even more bacon. And it just cuts like bacon, bacon, bacon. Let's get some damn bacon. And so in a way, like I don't know what group falls into. But it does do, it has other things to it. So it has that sense of absurdity. They're sort of more like of that kind of general like culture and it's funny as hell. Comedy, which is the most difficult thing in the world to pull off successfully is probably the single best thing you can do to find an audience on the web. It'd be funny. So they've had 412 million total views screaming bacon once a week. Targeting geeks and so they have this weekly, again the weekly release schedule. They're building an audience. You see the first one and you're like, that was hilarious. I'll click subscribe, click. And then it comes out again the following week and you build affinity for what you're doing. You build an audience. They're your audience. They love what you're doing. I think it can't be underestimated how important that consistency is. And the two examples I'm gonna bring up next are in stark contrast to what we've seen so far and yet apply the same basic principles. And they consistently beat the views. So taking the exact opposite side of the spectrum, there are these makeup video blogs. So I know that a lot of girls in the audience because it's fee and it's Austrian economics and liberty. How many of you have watched any of these makeup video bloggers? Okay. So, yeah, how to make myself look like Jessica Alba or what, but I mean, but it's all kinds of different things. How to go to the grocery store and I don't know. I, but you know, these are two examples. Each of them has 600 to 800,000 subscribers. Now these are staying in very stark contrast to everything I've shown up to this point on a number of fronts. They are not highly produced. They are mainly the woman sitting in front of her webcam simply doing the work and talking about it pretty extemporaneously. They're not edited heavily. I mean, they're the exact opposite from a visual sophistication standpoint. However, they do show tremendous craft and these women are geeks of their craft. They take it seriously and they do an amazing job and that I think still plays into that broader theme and they are ultimately finding an audience of interest of like-minded interest and affinity. Each of them has gotten between 100 and 160 million views on their YouTube channel, unbelievable. So as I said, they're targeting makeup geeks. Again, weekly releases. So now these don't reach the same level and I think the things like comedy and production value and are part of what bring the prior examples up higher but they're getting a consistently 250,000 views every week. Now, that beats most of cable news. I mean, it certainly beats most of non-Fox cable news whether you love or hate Fox. I mean, that's probably beating the entire week for CNN. So, yeah, I realize it's a low standard. So, I mean, that's just incredible. And it's, you know, so it does suggest that there is a certain degree of consistency here even when you take radically different subject matter in audiences and look at where they line up and where you see common tactics and common strategies and common ways of doing things. The very community nature of these videos in particular, the ways in which in the videos, the girls will actually talk back to their, you know, various commenters from the prior week. They will solicit requests for a look to do and that type of engagement is also something that never was really possible before but is amazing. It's an amazing new thing, like, you know, Russ has said to me that he really thinks that we fundamentally learn through discourse. They're talking with one another. It's part of why lectures like this in some ways kind of suck because you're all sitting and I'm talking. And the way we really get into things and understand them is to have a conversation, to test what we know and partly test what we think we know by trying to say it in a way that somebody else can understand. And what social media, what digital distribution gives you the opportunity to do is actually do that but with the tools of broadcast because the chances are if you've got 100,000 viewers, there's not necessarily gonna be 100,000 different questions. You might have top 10 questions that cover most of the main things that people have a question about and you see, I think, that dynamic starting to play out in some of these educational startups that are offering sort of video classes, things like Udacity and Khan Academy and Learn Liberty. But even though, but the ones that are really trying to target, like, you're gonna walk through a specific course curriculum, but do it using these tools, I think there's a lot of sort of educational upheaval that is only just beginning. Nobody is more excited to destroy the ways these things are taught than me. If I could eliminate the entire concept of the way introductory macroeconomics is taught and replace it with something more akin to fear the boom and bust, and that is a personal mission of mine. Thinking about how to do that occupies a lot of my time. But we can now, we can destroy it. We can take on some of these institutions that have been doing damage to our civilization and our understanding of the world. And we can be like educational agorists. We can just ignore them and go right around, pretend they don't exist. We, and we don't even need to complain about them. Just go direct to the people. And that's the most exciting thing about social media to me. So I've gone over this a lot, but there's repeating. The lessons we've learned, you know, targeting an activated audience. And again, targeting suggests that let's go after what the kids like. This is more of a result than a choice, I think, when you're doing it well. You want to tell your story, and your story is, you know, is part of it. There's a community or a cultural affinity there. There's a group that you are a part of, or a group that you want to reach, that you are just trying to speaking to. Trying to speak to. And this is what you're going to do. You're not going to try to reach everybody. Even if ultimately it'd be nice for it to be accessible to everybody, but it doesn't always need to be. Being authentic enough of the audience is, I just think, consistently across all of the videos that are not just a one-off. One-offs happen all the time. But the ones that don't apply to any of this stuff. Kids bit, you know, little kids bite each other's fingers and all kinds of things that get enormous one-off success. And that's it. They're the black swans, forget about them. The consistent audience builders, I think, are employing some flavor of these in many other techniques. Demonstrating expertise, which was a part of that great public speaking talk we heard yesterday. Being great at something and then showing people is cool. It's neat to see other people that are really good at stuff. And it is a kind of aspirational thing. But to me that also suggests, you know, find your comparative advantage and really dig into that. And if you want to try to reach people using video, think about, don't think about what's the big topic we can cover. Think about what you're really great at and how you can do it. And if it applies to video, then do it that way. But really stay, you know, leverage what you're great at. Leverage your comparative advantage and that I think is what you're gonna ultimately be your best asset in the process. And when you do that, I think you will have and you will earn that geek credibility that seems to be pretty important on the web. And in a world where, you know, people are picking and choosing where they're, what they're engaging in. And that's part of why this happens. We, you know, there's a birds of a feather part of this human experience and it's applying more, we're seeing it unfold on the web because of that, because of human nature. And lastly, consistency, consistency, consistency, which we haven't followed with the raps just because of resources and time and we've been busy doing other things as well like Crony's action figures. But, but yeah, if you wanna try to do something where you're gonna create an audience, do it, commit yourself to doing it probably weekly. You know, Russ's podcast econ talk comes out every week, it's a big part of its success. One of the first video blogs that was noteworthy and successful was by a guy, I don't know if this was actually his name or not, called Ze Frank. How many of you have ever seen Ze Frank? Okay, Chuck has up there. I think he posted a new video every day and he actually, in a sense, established this technique of talking fast into the camera and then hard cutting really rapidly and sort of, you know, making it this abrupt, somewhat abrupt and like syncopated feeling experience that's really punchy where you're just seeing, you're just, you know, it's just cutting hard and you're saying things and then you're looking away and you're saying, you're repeating yourself and a big part of his success and he said it, I think he did it every single day for a year. So it just, it literally became appointment viewing. It became something that you built into your habit. We are habitual creatures and I think that's why consistency is such an important force for trying to reach people on the web and that's it. So, do you have any questions? What do you think are the most relevant groups for us to be reaching in order to advance liberty and when reaching groups outside of the already Austrian economics community, do you have any suggestions to really be able to be authentic with them and connect with them? I can't really answer how to be authentic because it is entirely a matter, it's a very subjective thing and it really is based on you. I mean, that's sort of the nature of it, right? That's the nature of authenticity. It's sort of coming from who you are and what you wanna say. So trying, I think being honest is a really great starting point and challenging yourself, challenging your own biases, finding your own understanding of these ideas that doesn't sound like everyone else and everything you've read, I think is really important because we have a lot of the same way of talking about this. We have a lot of different ways too. And the great thing about the tradition and all the work that's been done to restate what essentially is a fairly small set of ideas in millions of different ways means we can retell other people's ideas, just steal. Steve Jobs said great artist steal, he's darn right. Steal it, steal the great stuff, take it from everywhere you can find it. As far as reaching people outside of the group, I would say Jesus Christ did a pretty good job of that. And what he did was, and I'm not, again, I'm not a expert on Big J, but he used parables, right? He told stories that made sense to the people he was talking to that used their experiences. He found the things that people could understand and find that point of reference. And so I think the first step to have, I think this is, and this is just for communication in general, when you want to talk to somebody that doesn't already think like you, isn't already steeped in your ideas, find a common ground and build back up from there. Find the place where you agree. Now I realize that's easier in a conversation, but if you're gonna put a video out and you want people of a particular community orientation, however that you wanna define that to see it, that isn't just 75% white male libertarians, I think it would really be helped to at least reach out and try to get some understanding even in the crudest sort of just having conversations with people that disagree, that look at the world a different way and find where their baseline is, where are the places you agree, build back up from there. So we talked about the anything peaceful. A lot of people that came into Ron Paul and by virtue of being excited about him got exposed to our ideas, came in through anti-war and through other issues or drug legalization. And those are still fundamentally about our freedoms and our liberty and our ability to chart our own course and not have it either destroyed or have it forbidden. And that's a starting point. That can be, I think that's a great starting point. And then go with that and find the parables that you can tell.