A Quarter Of A Million Visitors

No - I haven't had a quarter of a million visitors to this blog - I should be so lucky! Those are the sort of numbers reserved for Accidental Hedonist, 101 Cookbooks and Chez Pim. But this morning I welcomed the 250,000th visitor to my YouTube account - and the two are closely related, as I'm about to explain.

Back in September 2006 I wrote: "We've been experimenting with video technology in our house, as I want to be one of the first food bloggers in the world to show regular movie clips on my blogsite." It wasn't an original idea, of course, but it was certainly one that caught on. Two years later there are hundreds (if not thousands) of food blogs out there that regularly feature videos - and my little effort is just one of them.

When I began I needed somewhere to host my clips and, not having my own server space, I opted for YouTube. At first I only uploaded my own recordings, but after a while I began to include the odd commercial clip of relevance to my postings. These things develop with time and, after a while, I found myself writing the odd post around interesting food-related videos that I came across, such as the Rahmens' Splitting My Hashi. Although I've undoubtedly committed a few breaches of intellectual property rights, I've always tried to steer the right side of the ethical line. My blog is non-commercial and I only publish short edited clips to illustrate points about food and food writing - almost always making positive references to the subjects of the videos and those who recorded them. And on those few occasions when my subject has been a victim of negative comment, it's always been someone whose back is sufficiently broad. I don't expect Gordon Ramsay to burst into tears over anything I've said about him. Some of my clips attracted significant viewerships. A Rory Bremner impersonation of Jamie Oliver achieved an audience of over 2,000 and two short clips of me making rose-water spheres, Ferran Adrià style, managed 2,500 viewers between them. Clips of last year's MasterChef runner-up Emily Ludolf - who brought a blast of fresh air to an otherwise stuffy production - were very well-received. And videos featuring The Great White went down very well, attracting over 100 comments from drooling female admirers most of whom were young enough to be his daughter and in some cases his granddaughter. But of all the video clips I've published, one in particular attracted an audience way beyond anything I expected. One day last August I decided to respond to a meme - this particular one hosted by Rachel of Food Maven. "Retro food that wiggles and wobbles" was what she asked for - and I couldn't think of anything more retro, wiggly and wobbly than spaghetti from the days of black & white just after World War II. I knew of the existence of this video from parental anecdotes, but boy was it hard to find! I spent hours searching the internet until eventually I found it in the deepest recesses of the BBC website.

Without a further thought I published the clip, got my anticipated 92 blog visits and 2 comments and thought nothing more of it. Then, around the start of April this year, I noticed my YouTube numbers starting to rise at an unprecedented rate. That 1957 April Fool's Day spoof video by Richard Dimbleby had started to attract viewers in numbers I'd only dreamt about. By the time the excitement died down, nearly 100,000 people had watched the clip. Some even reported having had it screened in school by their teachers. Wow!

One thing you learn from all this is that quality will out in the end. The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest may be 51 years old and in grainy black and white, but it is a work of true genius. And that voice still to this day exemplifies everything great about British broadcasting and, in particular, the BBC. In my 18 months of food blogging, I've had about 75,000 visitors to this site and twice that number of page views, with current figures running just over 200 visitors a day. Some way short of the quarter of a million who've checked out my YouTube account. And even further short of the 63.5 million downloads of last year's best selling UK track from a fellow former Hackney resident. But then this is the age of video, after all. I must get round to making some more!