Day Five: Namaste Gary

Day Five: Namaste Gary

New Jersey, May 2004. A Saturday evening just after nine o’clock. An engineering student from Bergen County Technical High School in Teterboro (ok, a ‘nerd’) just installed a new toy, a webcam. He is playing around with it and makes a webcam video of himself miming to the song "Dragostea din tei" by Moldovan pop band O-Zone. Little did he know that the following 1:40 minutes were not only going to change his life but also the complete direction of the internet economy.





The video became such a phenomenon watched by millions of people and downloaded more than 1,000,000,000 times. It switched to YouTube for sheer mass. On YouTube itself in the first month it was translated in 87 languages by 263 performers out of 148 countries. There were derivatives of this song as rap, country, rock.. all done by internet consumers, not professionals. Gary Brolsma became known as Numa Numa, after a phrase in the song. He was with Ophra, ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's The Tonight Show, and VH1's Best Week Ever. The unwilling and embarrassed nerd became a mainstream celebrity, subject of a large article in the New York Times and frequent guest of NBC Today Show. Gary’s Numa Numa song is the most downloaded song on earth now.




Gary Brolsma is credited with singlehandedly
• justifying the existence of webcams
• the power of YouTube
• the proof of viral marketing
• the impossibility of a record house to uphold their copyright when all the world is singing their song.

What made Gary universally viral was the fact that he was genuine, that he was totally happy with the new toy he just installed but above all Gary was a “Mensch”. We recognized ourselves in him.

Today I was going to tell you how we are going to go to millions of visitors. We will be able to if we are genuine, if we are proud of what we do and if we are “Menschen”. This is very, very difficult and most viral programs fail, because they do not have these ingredients. Faking reality if a lot harder than you think (although at my age the difference between stimulation and simulation becomes blurry :-).

For us this means that we need to be proud of our product, install it, be so happy with it that our passion and our enthusiasm flows over in the cups of millions of others. Mensch to Mensch.

P.S Gary graduated but still every day, millions of people download him and more than a hundred new versions appear on YouTube. He was voted the Number 1 Internet Icon by 40 Greatest Internet Superstars on VH1.