Infiche said:Filthy frank is known for his particular style of comedy. The guy who began the harlem shake craze
That "craze" is actually an interesting side-topic in itself. See this detailed explanation, it is a really good read:
https://qz.com/67991/you-didnt-make-the-harlem-shake-go-viral-corporations-did/
Pretty much, the media was primed for the latest "viral sensation" so a couple of click bait mills / media conglomerates jumped on this. At that point, the actual videos only had a couple thousand views, and was limited to a couple of reaction / imitation videos by Filthy Frank fans.
A new imitation of “Harlem Shake” appeared. It came not from YouTube users, but from Maker Studios, a Los Angeles company that specializes in making money from YouTube and is partly owned by Time Warner. Maker Studios employee Vernon Shaw noticed the longboarders’ “Harlem Shake” videos on Reddit, a major tributary of information on the internet. Shaw thought the videos looked “pre-viral” and saw an opportunity to exploit them to promote Maker. On Thursday, Feb. 7, Maker employee Rawn Erickson uploaded an imitation of the Florida video with Maker Studios staff dancing in the Maker Studios office. Maker promoted the video across its many YouTube channels as well as on Twitter.
So you had a corporate click bait mill who noticed a knock-off version of Filthy Frank's version, so they made their own then pumped their own version out on every channel they had access to.
Rodrigues and his record label Mad Decent immediately started promoting the video. Rodrigues, using his stage name “Baauer,” record label owner Thomas Wesley Pentz, and Chicago deejays Josh Young and Curt Cameruci, signed to Mad Decent all posted tweets and messages to send traffic to the Australian video on YouTube. Six Twitter accounts—EDM Snob, Baauer, Diplo, Mad Decent, Major Lazer and Flosstradamus—were the cause of views of “Harlem Shake” on Thursday, Feb. 7 and Friday, Feb. 8. EDM Snob was selling himself. The other five were selling the record.
So basically then 6 social media accounts started boosting the meme heavily. Notably 5/6 of them were associated with the creator of the song used in the original video.
The advertisers and agencies who spent the week after the Super Bowl looking for the next big thing in social media spent the weekend after the Super Bowl believing they had found it: because of the tweets by Maker and Mad Decent, they started copying the Florida longboarders, doing a two steps removed imitation of George Miller dancing to “Harlem Shake,” believing it to be a pure product of the YouTube community.
So the next step was that every ad agency and media company decided they could make their own versions for clicks, based on the supposed "virality" of the previous wave of social media about it, which was pretty much all by the content mill and the record label.
On Feb. 13—after Today Show host Al Roker danced to “Harlem Shake” in a cupid costume and 82-year old economist Alice Rivlin, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, danced to “Harlem Shake” in a stars and stripes top hat to promote deficit reduction—David Wagner, writing in The Atlantic, declared the “Harlem Shake” dead.
So it was dead within two weeks of Filthy Frank's video, and less than 1 week after supposedly "going viral", because every corporate entity on the planet decided it was a slow news week so they used it as filler of the latest "crazy thing the kids are into". |
