(This photo cracks me up. Everyone but Anthony is making a weird face.)
I just had dinner with Chris Clappe and Jacob Ruff last night, our usual friday night dinner. Whilst eating away and saying weird things, according to Jacob I said, “I like back to back babies.” I have NO IDEA whether I said that or what it is in reference to, but that is beside the point. We got to talking about my SKYLMT part, and how I was slightly disappointed with the overall reaction to it from the majority of the comments about it. Chris brought up a super great point though, while the reaction may not have been what I was looking for, the video reached a much, much larger audience than most fixed gear videos do. It was reaching outside of the small circle of fixed freestyle fanatics, many that I know by name, and to people who ride bmx, track bikes, mtb, or other aspects of cycling that may not understand what makes fixed freestyle unique or hard. Especially with the similarity of the tricks I have been doing to current bmx edits, the video may not read as a good fixed gear edit, but more a lackluster bmx edit.
Tyler Johnson from SKYLMT™ on Vimeo.
After sitting down and mulling this over, I came across this post on The Come Up’s Chicken and Rice where Adam talks about view numbers of most pro BMX edits, the time that these views are acquired, and the ratings of views similar to records.
“Then how did this get 100,000 views in 2 and a half weeks? I know for a fact that the average BMXer now considers street his favorite type of riding; our recent demographic survey says that 72% of TCU’s readers (or at least the 1700 or so who were willing to fill out a survey for me) consider street their favorite form of riding; hilariously/amusingly/weirdly/unfortunately, Vital’s media kit says that 77% of their reader’s agree. But when 2 riders who are virtually unknown can go platinum (100,000 views is platinum, 50,000 is gold, a million is diamond just like in the record business) off of a 3 and a half minute skatepark session, what does that say? Top street edits from big name street pro’s like Brad Simms and Nathan Williams don’t even get those kind of numbers. A fairly popular edit (something like the OSS trailer, the Tony Neyer exclusive or Miles Rogoish) will usually settle in around 20,000 views after a couple months. Unknown riders first getting posted on TCU/Ride/Vital will often get somewhere around 5000. So t 100,000 in 2 weeks from a couple of Scottish kids riding an indoor park is really remarkable. That’s as many as the Fiend promo, which if you ask me (or anyone really) was the most popular street edit of last year amongst those who “get” BMX and it’s been out for 5 months.“
That really put things into perspective for me. Although, fixed gear freestyle is NOT bmx, most of us watch all the new bmx edits as well. So I mean if my edit, filmed over a month in winter, was able to accumulate 21K views in a month, that is AMAZING not lackluster. I think this may have been a case of me dreaming to big, and who can blame me? I busted my ass, literally, filming for this video part, my friends dedicated hours and hours of time going out with me to film it, and in the end it was all worth it.
I hope this post doesn’t sound to weird or self centered, but maybe you will find it interesting to see how my thought process works sometimes. I think we all know the feeling were you work really hard on something, but don’t get the response or reaction you thought you would. I still would like to say THANK YOU to every blog who posted it and helped promote SKYLMT . We are going to have big things dropping soon!
It’s the weekend, go out, ride your bike, have fun, and dream as big as you can.
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