Going Viral- and You Can Too!

In fall 2007,  IU alumnus Phil McLaughlin packed his worldly possessions and his newly minted telecommunications degree and headed west. He moved into a “microscopic” one-bedroom apartment with his girlfriend and started work as an intern at nationallampoon.com producing and editing Internet content and a college TV show.

This job, landed courtesy of college buddy Aaron Waltke by a process that Waltke admittingly refers to as cronyism, enabled McLaughlin to work on a series of the biggest Internet videos of that year, “Fat Britney Spears.” One of the videos has 16 million hits on Youtube to date.

Waltke and McLaughlin hit it off at IU performing improv comedy with the campus-based comedy troupe All Sorts of Trouble for the Boy in the Bubble.

When these two IU alumni are not hooking each other up with once-in-a-life time jobs, they are making Internet comedy short films under the name Moon County along with eight other IU “cronies” that migrated to Los Angeles to break into the entertainment industry.

The Moon County brand

Moon County has been making films for its Web site, mooncounty.com, for more than two years. There are both live-action and animated sketches and virtually none of the videos pass the five-minute mark.

“I personally try to keep things as short as possible, since viral popularity relies on either a time frame an ADD-suffering, cracked-out chimp would be willing to sit through, or two girls eating poop,”  Moon County member John Druska said.

While Moon County has been writing and performing comedy since their earliest college days, troupe members have recently become quasi-Internet experts as well.

With tracking tools made available via Youtube, Moon County can see a breakdown of who is watching its videos and from where, how long viewers watch and geographical “hot spots.” Moon County also learned that labeling a video correctly can yield many more hits.

This online mastery happened almost by accident.

About a year ago, Moon County posted the sketch “Rape Tunnel” to Youtube, which got a staggering number of hits (more than 65,000 to date). McLaughlin was able to deduce, with the online tracking tools, that an inordinate amount of people in India were searching the word “rape” on Youtube and the “Rape Tunnel” sketch must have been one of the first videos in the search results, he said.

It’s not always easy to scientifically prove why a Moon County video becomes successful though. The cause of the success of the video,  “Bloody Mary” is hard to pinpoint.

“I guess people really like seeing Aaron pull down his pants, shit celery and drink out of a toilet, McLaughlin said.

While the members of Moon County are garnering awards (one of their videos won an atom.com contest and was shown late-night on Comedy Central) and Internet fame, Moon County is not paying the bills. Yet.

Everyone in Moon County has day jobs, most in the entertainment industry, to make ends meet. Druska landed a spot on a Schick razor commercial earlier this year, Paul Straw did some freelance work on the set of “Speed Racer” and “1010,; and McLaughlin landed a production gig on the set of the new NBC dramedy “Parenthood.”

Not too bad for some state-schooled funny men in a city where people spend 10 or 15 years trying to break into the industry. They are all quick to say Moon County, as a support system of talented friends, is key in their success.

Perhaps Waltke sums up the best when talking about “the LA dream” and the hopefully sustained success of Moon County.

“We knew it wouldn’t happen overnight,” he said.

For more information, bios on the members, videos and the official Moon County blog, click over to mooncounty.com.