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{"id":338,"date":"2009-01-14T16:15:19","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T00:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonathanhstrauss.com\/blog\/?p=338"},"modified":"2009-01-14T16:16:34","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T00:16:34","slug":"happyjoel-on-the-cbs-evening-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jstrauss.me\/blog\/2009\/01\/happyjoel-on-the-cbs-evening-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Happyjoel on the CBS Evening News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted from the Snowball Factory blog<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Last week, our friend (and first client) Joel Moss Levinson, aka Happyjoel<\/a>, appeared in a CBS Evening News with Katie Couric segment called Cashing In on YouTube<\/a> (watch it below). For Joel, this follows an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno<\/a>, a profile in the New York Times<\/a>, and (our personal favorite) being named an AccessHollywood.com Rising Star<\/a>. As you can see in the clip below, the majority of this coverage has been driven by the novelty of Joel’s success. He’s a guy who subsists entirely by making amusing music videos for products for which he has no personal affinity<\/a> — what news producer wouldn’t love this story?!<\/p>\n

<\/object>
\nWatch CBS Videos Online<\/a><\/p>\n

For us though, the real story isn’t the wackiness of Joel’s success but rather how he has achieved it. Of course, having the ability to come up with witty lyrics about how awesome watermelons are<\/a> and the time and energy to scour the interwebs for brands looking to crowd-source their marketing are necessary, but they’re not sufficient. Michael Buckley<\/a>, the other online video personality covered in the CBS News segment, told the NY Times<\/a> \u201cI was spending 40 hours a week on YouTube for over a year before I made a dime.\u201d Like Michael, Joel does a lot more than just what you see on screen. Arguably, making the videos is the easy part (at least for someone like Joel) — the real challenge has been building and cultivating the loyal fan-base (or as Joel calls it, his “contest voting army”) that has made him such a newsworthy phenomenon.<\/p>\n

As of this writing, Joel has:<\/p>\n