It has been a wondrous week -
On Monday I dropped the masters of KTL 4 and KTL 5 off at the repro house in Buckingham. It was a sort of liberation as they have been haunting me for weeks. I finished editing the films ages ago but then I have to make lots of different versions - ones for uploading to Amazon, different ones for uploading to youtube and then the PAL and NTSC versions for the DVD masters. The four year old editing computer has been beavering away shifting digits like there was no tommorrow.
It was a good week also because on Monday I sold my Starlings film to massive accountants KPMG for use at a conference. I never know how to charge for the use of the Starlings film (copyright is dead - discuss) so when people ask how much for a license I usually say that have no idea what your budget is - make me an offer and I will almost certainly accept it on the basis that you are klikely to offer me about 80 per cent of whatever you can afford. They offered me £700 for a one minute burst of film and for the use on their website. Can I just say that not all weeks start that well for me.
The KTL youtube site normally gets around 2,000 hits a day but at the beginning of the week it rose to around 4,000 hits a day. I had a look to see which film people were watching and it was this one
I made it last winter just to demonstrate that flower pot candle heaters work. It was for sailors really and it also has an old Two Ronnies joke in it.
it comes from this sketch
Up until Tuesday the Potheadforkandle film had accumulated about 8,000 hits. Then the hit rate started to rise.
By Wednesday lunch time the hits had risen to 50,000. By Thursday lunchtime it was around 100,000 - it turned out that the film had spread around face-book and was then be embedded in US and Uk sites about living off grid and on the cheap.
On Thursday my inbox started to look like this
suddenly I was being offered business opportunities for my viral video
The phone rang and it was a man called Richard from an outfit called Newsflare
their strapline is "shoot video, tell the World, get paid"
Richard told me that if I changed the wording in the blurb on the video to give them the rights he would skim the video from youtube, sell it to newspapers and split the money 50/50 with me.
So that it was I did. Within an hour I was a story on the Daily Mail website
here it is...
they even made a nice graphic
It turns out that the Daily Mail paid Richard £60 for the story and I will get £30 via paypal.
Now if I type my name into Google I get thousands of hits from news agencies all over the place. I am even named as a boat operator or a youtube enthusiast.
The comments on the film are priceless and range from those who think it is dan gerous to the bloke who though he had spotted a bong in my office - another poster said that it was a champagne bottle - it is the latter by the way
The hits on youtube kept on rising and the film has now, on Saturday night , had over 400,000 hits.
In the old days when I was an adsense affliate I would have received around $400 for the hits on the film - however the past is the past and I am happy with the £30 - half a tank of petrol for the Polo is better than nothing.
if you want my verssion of the Adsense debacle it is here
http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/11/columns/guest/winter/
It is amazing - when I started as a hack I was using a manual typrewriter, shouting copy down the phone to a secretary who wore unfeasably short skirts and my words were turned into metal blocks which were used to smash coal based ink onto sheets of mashed up wood pulp.
Now billions of digits flow out of a bedroom and around the World.
Of course in the old days we got paid £100 a thousand for words - now the few remaining magazines pay $100 a page - good old PBO still pays £100 a page - gawd blessum!
One other thing - the other day a box arrived from Amazon. I did not remember ordering anything so I opened it with great excitement. A fellow sailor and Minstrel owner called Mick had bought me one of these as a gift
http://www.elyboatchandlers.com/origo-hobs-and-burners/origo-5100-heatpal
Now if that is not a beautiful thang I don't know what is.
It has been a great week for an old hack. Bless you Mick for sending me the heat pal, Bless you KPMG for buying the Starlings film, Bless you blokes who bought the DVDs or resubscribed to the website - Bless you Richard from Newsflare for kicking £30 my way
and
a curse on the inhuman Google/Youtube algorythms for kicking me out of adsense.
Excellent Dylan, maybe Google will come back with an offer that would be funny…Andy
Might be worth a contrite, pleading, even grovelling, message to Google.
Not your style I know (or mine) but a means to an end perhaps?
Can’t lose anything by it, and might just gain a lot.
Hi Dylan,
I’ve heard about your plantpot wonder heater now on a number of local radio stations. Brilliant hopefully some more cash will come your way.
Best,
Mat
Dear Dylan,
your video plus this article just made my day! It’s so nice to see that there’s still folks like you out there who have an easy and humorous approach to fame and money issues. I love the way you’ve delt with your situation.
I just started trying out your amazing heater, set it up in my little home office. If it works well, I’d be happy to return the favour to you somehow. I’ll come back and let you know …
So far, a big THANK YOU from Germany!
Warm regards
bru