Kabouter Wesley: The Unintended Hit
Since a year or two for the Belgians and a couple of months for the Dutch, the videos about Kabouter Wesley (Leprechaun Wesley) have become immensely popular. Everyone wants to follow the adventures of the kranky cartoon leprechaun.
As you can see, in this particular video you can hardly see anything. So what makes Kabouter Wesley so popular that over 25.000 people want to see this video?
Kabouter Wesley was never intended to be broadcast. The creator, Jonas Geirnaert from Belgium, drew Kabouter Wesley at the time he was working on his animation film Flatlife. He wanted to create simplistic stuff to alternate the intricate work on Flatlife. The cartoons first appeared in a Belgian magazine and at the end of 2009 they appeared on Man Bijt Hond, a Belgian (and Dutch) television show.
The cool thing is that nor Geirnaert nor the production company Woestijnvis really wanted the videos to appear on YouTube. The videos were uploaded by fans who usually did this straight after the latest episode had aired on television. On YouTube you will find that Kabouter Wesley has no official channel and almost every episode has been uploaded by a different user. Also, Wesley’s journey to Holland was not intended but happened anyway through blogs and YouTube. Apparently people can’t get enough of this tiny loudmouth.
The result was that the Belgian Anti-piracy Federation (BAF) demanded all Kabouter Wesley videos be removed from YouTube. Apparently this wasn’t very effective, the videos are still there.
I think it’s fantastic how Kabouter Wesley got picked up by the masses and became more popular than Geirnaert could ever imagine. The fact that the videos are still on YouTube after the BAF’s warning shows how powerful social media can be in spreading the word. Not long after the warning by BAF people started creating and uploading their own versions of Kabouter Wesley protesting against BAF and Woestijnvis.
This video was tracked using ViralTracker. The graph showing the views has an interesting dip on January 15th, after which the number of views gradually rises again with 2.000 to 3.000 views per day. I think an explanation could be that the first couple of thousand views are from the truly loyal fans and then it takes a while to reach the masses. Any insights?
Follow us on Twitter, sign up for our weekly e-mail or watch the ViralTracker social video metrics demo.
Related Posts
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Seems like an accidantal small heroe
Interesting story. Make it 180,000 views total for “Springende Licht” video. Seems you forgot to track some duplicated videos and the first uploaded video with 125,000 views
Chart worthless …
What I found more interesting is how many views until now the videos have gathered and why they don’t strike a deal with YouTube.
because woestijnvis, who owns the rights to this, is old-fashioned and they want them vids off the net. which is quite stupid of course. anyway kabouter wesley is rockin!!!
It seems I have missed some videos
When looking for a cool new video to track I saw that this one was very new so I jumped into it without realising there might be tons of others (with different titles).
It seems they are desperately trying to keep Kabouter Wesley to themselves. I think they didn’t see this hype coming but are afraid to embrace it now.
I think trying to add up all the views of all the Kabouter Wesley videos will not be a valid thing to do as the videos have been removed according to a lot of blogs. So the numbers won’t ever be the ‘real’ ones
Woestijnvis is not striking deals with anyone, not even DWDD
Kabouter Wesley found a Dutch home at Comedy Central. They’ll premiere the first new episode tomorrow evening. Cool!
That’s cool indeed, I remember reading it somewhere, but I couldn’t verify it. Thanks!
i know kabouter wesley, i see a new episode of him every friday on comedy central netherlands