Saturday night, August 27, 2015, I went viral. Not in a health way, but in a social media way. I attended Kelly Clarkson in Toronto at the Molson Canadian Amphitheatre, took a video of her singing Blank Space by Taylor Swift and posted it to YouTube.
At her shows, she takes a fan request and will do a cover. Normally the cover is pretty awesome. Saturday, she definitely delivered by singing Taylor Swift's Blank Space.
Having seen Kelly before, I am always excited to see what song she will perform and I wasn't disappointed this show. I recorded it and promptly posted to YouTube.
Things took off. Fans of both artists began tweeting up the event and suddenly I was climbing up in views. Then it happened. Taylor Swift tweeted to her 61M followers:
Kelly Clarkson covered Blank Space and YES.
http://t.co/qwhXSxPOEx
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) July 26, 2015Then it really took off. Justjared.com, EW.com, US Weekly, People.com, ETOnline, Perezhilton.com, and so on. Things got crazy.
By the end of Sunday night I was at 800k views. I could taste the 1 million hits. There is something surreal about it, people were watching my video. People were hearing my voice sing "Look at that Face", Taylor Swift had heard me sing it.
So now it is Thursday, the buzz has died down and the video is now slow and steadily getting about 2000 hits an hour. Still not bad.
Last night I was thrown a curve ball. I had simply checked the Monetize button on the video so ads were showing. I wasn't doing this for the money, I love Kelly Clarkson and I think she did a bang up job. I wanted people to see that. Plus there is some ego stroking when you managed to get something that ends up in Buzzfeed Trending or peaks at #9 on the YouTube popular list.
But 9 entities made claim that they wanted a cut of my success and the revenue dollars that I could potentially make from monetizing the video. I have put in a dispute because I'm not trying to make money off of this video, I'm simply a fan that wanted to share this awesome cover. I'll keep you posted.
Anyway, here is the video below, hope you enjoy as much as I did.
