The Schrug

I had a brilliant idea last night as the gloom of the Martha Coakley debacle set in. I was trying to imagine how President Obama must have been feeling as the returns were announced, and I thought of that scene from Downfall that has been endlessly parodied on YouTube. (Quick side note: I had to laugh just now as I was getting the link to Downfall from IMDB and the first thing that caught my eye was “Spoiler Alert!”) I’d seen and enjoyed a couple of the parody videos before, and this was the perfect opportunity to make one.

Some three-and-a-half hours later, I posted my creation:

I put a link to the video in my Facebook status update and in a tweet with the #MASen hashtag, and went to bed.

This morning I was very happy to see that a handful of people had already watched it. Some of my Facebook friends shared it, and some of their friends watched it, too. It wasn’t too long before the video had over 100 views. I was pretty psyched. People were paying attention.

Then around 1:00 this afternoon I saw myself mentioned in a tweet. It said “@universalhub Local playwright Dave Schrag’s video @dvschrag is a better take: http://bit.ly/7iOtjH.” OK, I thought, that’s good news. One of my friends is spreading the word. But then I thought … Wait a minute. A “better take” than what?

I looked at @universalhub’s earlier tweets and found “Hitler is stunned by Coakley’s defeat. http://bit.ly/6pRqzt.” Someone else had come up with exactly the same idea. And this other video was getting picked up all over the place, including big-name sites like Comedy Central. It was no contest. By early evening, my video had been watched almost 350 times, a number that I would have been awfully pleased with twelve hours prior. But this other video – which is funny but, IMHO, not as funny as mine – had almost 75,000 views. Seventy-five-THOUSAND views in a day. It was the 55th most viewed video today on ALL OF YOUTUBE!

So I ask those of you who know this stuff better than I, what did I do wrong? Why did this other guy go viral and not me? Did I fail to plant some seeds in the most obvious places? Or did this DrRonPaul2012 fellow have a huge head start on me? (He’s only got 61 YouTube subscribers, so I don’t think that alone could account for the rapid spread.)

Any ideas?