Quarter Million Video Views

I could have just as easily said 250,000 online video views, but it lacks the drama of 'a quarter million'! In the end these are just numbers anyway. I consider views a badge of achievement in some ways, but mostly they're a skewed statistic that negates the quality of what was being watched. And to be clear, it's not really about the quantity of views, but the quality - people who don't just click, but those who actually pay attention. Not to mention, I'm trying to create more of an impression than what a lot of viral videos are.

It's amazing to me that of all my views so much and so little has come. Festival invitations, interviews, people asking for advice, etc. mixed with weeks of not a single word or sentence of feedback. In the beginning the idea of reaching 250,000 views sounded like reaching the big time - now 250,000 seems big to me only in relation to the views of a single video.

My biggest online video success thus far, all because I uploaded my work to Yobi.tv, has resulted in about 55,000 combined online views for my short The Gizmo Tree. That's not bad, and it would be even higher if I had records for how many views it got while being viewed as part of the online Sasktel Cell-ebrities contest.

Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful and very happy about 'a quarter million' views, but it was also no accident or chance that I sat back and just watched happen overnight. It's taken over 2 years of promotion, of messages and emails, of uploading to different sites, of linking, to hit this number (and I can't help but feel a bit jealous of the viral video that gets this in a matter of hours).

There's a lot of people out there creating content, but if I can attribute my success to anything so far, it's persistance. In the end I can't help but smile (1) because a few people are actually tuning in, and (2) because no matter what I do my views can only go up from here. Thanks for continuing to watch.

Editing Luke Blog Recap - 2009