A hilarious hip dance medley, then it's Viral City

10 viral sensations on life after internet fame

A hilarious, hip dance medley that, at one point, was the most viewed video on YouTube.

Judson Laipply:

I’m one of the few where my video directly affected my current career. A lot of other people who go viral have to switch careers, or they never really get to maximize such an event. For me, I was doing something already — working this inspirational-comedian idea, and doing the dance — and then that was like a 20-year boost of marketing and exposure. I was lucky because what I got famous for was something I was already becoming good at. 

The most watched video back then was the like Smosh Pokemon Theme Song, and the average age of a YouTuber was about 12 years old. So my video was kind of one of the first that people could related to past the age of 20. And because my video was right when YouTube was becoming popular, a lot of news stations would use it to show what’s on there. 

I did a second video, but we don’t talk about that one. I did it right during the big legal turmoil over song rights, when Viacom was suing YouTube, and Sony was suing YouTube. I’d gotten the streaming rights, but it was only for a few songs. In those early days, it was the Wild, Wild West. YouTube didn’t know what to do. Now they have the technology to recognize songs in the videos, and YouTube just distributes the money accordingly. But back then I didn’t want the owner of the rights — and there are 30 songs in that video — to say, “We need you to take that down.” So we had to put it on a different channel. Now that all that’s resolved, the third won’t have those problems. 

When my video took off, I got a call from them where it’s like “Hello?” “Hi, please hold for Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC.” I’m like still going, “Huh, what?” when he comes on the line and says, “We’re having this meeting in a couple weeks and I was wondering if you’d be able to come talk to us about internet stuff.” And it was so interesting being in the room — we were listening to the lawyers and their mind-set of “We need to take every person’s content down.” They were suggesting spending millions of dollars on telling people to. And Jeff said, “No, we need to let people just have it. Stop trying to put a finger in the hole when the dam has a thousand others.” 

I think the biggest — I don’t really want to say problem, but … [is that] I’ll be turning 40 in March. At most I have maybe just 10 more years of being able to physically do the dance. It’s a taxing thing. The running joke is that I say it’s eventually going to go from being funny to being sad. But I don’t regret anything, not in the slightest. If I could go back and redo anything, it would be that I’d have had a bunch of different merchandise and products to sell. Or maybe do a better job of getting viewers’ emails, so I could just send them a ton of stuff.