Melarky

This article appeared in the local Logan paper today. (Heidi, you and I need to get more shame.)

The Herald Journal By Jen Beasley
Published:
Wednesday, February 20, 2008 2:15 AM CST
Cache Valley YouTubers find fame in self-made, online videos

Idaho has its famous potatoes, but Cache Valley has famous Tubers of its own. They’re YouTubers, and they’re posting videos of themselves that range from the ordinary to the outrageous.

YouTube is a free Web site where anyone, for better or worse, can post video for the world to watch. Begun in 2005 during the upswing of reality television, the Web site was acquired by Google in 2006, and now resembles its parent only in that most anything that can be searched for can be found in video form.

“Anything you can think of you can probably find it on YouTube,” said Melanie Stevenson, one of the valley’s most prolific video voyeurs. “I have yet to search for something and not find it.”

Stevenson started on the site as a way to post videos of her son Wellington so distant friends and family could watch him grow. But as she got better with the camera and editing process, Stevenson, a homemaker, branched out.

Under the screenname Melarky she created a series of video cooking tips, and then a harebrained sequence of sketches based on the show Kenny vs. Spenny, which pits two young men against each other in a series of ridiculous and often painful challenges.

Now you can find her online in a hot-dog-eating competition, a sandwich-making competition and a pogo-sticking competition with her friend and sister-in-law Heidi Mitchell.

“There’s lots (of YouTubers) in the valley, but we’re probably the most shameless,” Stevenson said.

Each of the Mel vs. Heidi shorts end with the loser of the competition enduring a “Humiliation” of the winner’s choosing. When Mel beat Heidi at the sandwich-making contest, she sent Heidi dressed as a nun to the front of the Persian Peacock for a day to give blessings to passers-by.

But Mel got her comeuppance when Heidi sent her into Lee’s Marketplace dressed as a pirate to do a little grocery shopping.

“Do you accept doubloons?” a bandanaed Stevenson asks the cashier in the video. “Yeah, it’s like a pirate currency.”

Stevenson said the videos are just good fun.

“We’ve had a lot of people ask why two married ‘older’ girls with kids do this, don’t they have anything better to do? And the answer is no we don’t,” Stevenson said. “We even had someone comment on our video once that said, ‘Why aren’t we taking care of our kids?’ but we usually have our kids with us for all the videos. They are right along with us eating hot dogs and pogo sticking.”

Stevenson and Mitchell aren’t the only ones with nothing better to do.

Stevenson’s hot-dog-eating competition garnered 1,200 hits, and two of her videos have been commented on by Kenny Hotz, the original Kenny in Kenny vs. Spenny, who said he’d like to judge one.

James Cawley, who posts videos of his own under Cacheads, and for the local advertising company he works for under Inthedarkstudios, said the fact that people do watch is just the magic of YouTube.

“That’s part of the amazing thing about YouTube is you could videotape yourself videotaping yourself in the mirror and get people to watch it,” Cawley said. “If somebody could tap into that, into the key that makes that work, he’d be a millionaire.”

Cawley and his boss Chris Scholle are trying to do just that. Not only do they advertise their business on YouTube, but the pair is also trying to make a branch of In the Dark Studios that caters to the production of online visual advertising on sites like YouTube.

“In five years if your Web sites aren’t video-based, you’re not going to be in the marketplace,” Scholle predicted. “People are going to be bored.”

Cawley and Scholle said YouTube has been especially helpful as they’ve tested new marketing techniques because it’s possible to get instant feedback. And Cawley gets the same benefit for his personal animation and short films.

“You can put your projects out there and get the world’s opinion on it,” Cawley said.

“It’s like everyone’s an American Idol,” added Scholle.

Much of the key to getting seen comes from the search terms a user flags in his own video, said YouTube user Dustin Hawkes. Hawkes, or Logangliderman, posts videos of himself paragliding over Cache Valley with a camera strapped to his helmet. He learned firsthand that keywords matter.

His video featuring the word “wreckage” gleaned the most hits by far.

“Just by putting that there I think a lot of people hit it,” Hawkes said. “The big shock to me was it only took a couple of days before I had four or 500 hits.”

Hawkes also has one video of a friend scaring his wife with a trick computer game, which lets players advance a certain number of levels before shocking them with a scary face that pops out. That the wife popped out of her chair is not the only surprising thing about the video, however. Available in the “Related Videos” box was a host of other “Wife Scaring” clips, a type of video, like many others, that has found its own niche on YouTube.

It didn’t surprise Hawkes.

“Just about anything that I do that I have a video of that was exciting or different I would put up there,” he said. “I guess it’s just a fun technology that so many people get to use now, that a few years ago nobody would have even thought of.”