Eat, Pray, Cricket: Going Viral On The Subcontinent

Sometimes all it takes is a single email to change your life.

8:03 AM on the morning of August 26th, 2017:

One of the quirkier traditions we have at Metric is that of WESATOM. While the abbreviation continues to elude me, it’s essentially a weekly opportunity for a Metrician to present a topic of their choosing (rarely professional) to the rest of the office.

Honestly, it’s one of my favorite parts of working here. Hearing about how to do magic tricks, learning about the intricacies of Western Philosophy, and lock-picking simply aren’t topics I’m going to learn about other places. (And those are just some of the myriad topics we’ve had through the years.)

To date, I’ve given two WESATOMs. The first, concerning how the stock market works, was perhaps the more useful of the two. However, I can confidently say that it was not my most popular.

In the winter of 2012–2013 (literally right after Hurricane Sandy), I relocated to Melbourne, Australia for my consulting firm. For six months, I searched for what I called self-Austalization. (Hopefully Maslow wouldn’t be too insulted with the term.) In those six months, I did what I could to live like an Australian. I eschewed many opportunities to “do ex-pat things” as it simply didn’t feel like the right choice given my limited time on the Sunburned Island. And amongst the many things I attempted to learn about very quickly, cricket was perhaps my favorite.

I’m a sports nut. But rather than having a “favorite sport,” I say that I simply love the idea of sports. Groups of people coming together to contest a game of esoteric importance. It may be the finest of our social constructs. And whether it is that you like being a part of something bigger than yourself, to see people do things that are seemingly impossible, or simply use sports as an escape from your daily life, the concept of sports makes a lot of people a lot of happy. (I just like the way that sounds.)

So in Australia, I took to the sport that was being played at that time of the year, cricket. With the help of one of my bosses, Chuck Cowen, I slowly but surely slogged through the days, weeks, and really months it took to truly understand and appreciate the game. And while I have no unbiased panel of experts to assert this fact, I will say that I left Australia as a well-informed and more importantly, passionate cricket fan.

When it came time to select the topic for my second WESATOM, I knew I had to make it good.

The bar set by the team around here is high, so a poor topic selection would reflect negatively on my reputation. And while there are many topics I thought may have been satisfactory (the three main accounting statements, how to write great trivia questions, negotiations, the Bible as a history book, etc.), I made the decision to speak about cricket.

So on March 6th, 2017, I spent 67 minutes diving into the sport with Metric. Knowing that it took me months to “get” the game, I spent weeks preparing my lesson. Most importantly, Chuck and I spent four hours together the Sunday before simply sharpening my understanding of the game. While his knowledge is certainly first-class (cricket joke!), I knew the more difficult part was going to be deciding what to exclude! An exhaustive overview would have been in vain, as I didn’t have 10 years to present. So I did everything I could to fit the relevant and necessary details into the hour plus.

When it was all over I took a deep breath. While I knew the group was unlikely to become fans, I was confident that I had put my best foot forward (leg before the wicket?) in bringing the group along for the ride.

We’ve always talked about turning the WESATOMs into a web series. There’s been a long held belief that there would be no better content for us to produce then speaking about the things we’re passionate about.

Going back over a year now, the head of Metric Visual, Ed Goin, has recorded almost all of them.

And while we’ve never found it vital to edit the videos for the web, we have tens of hours of footage “in the can.” So when Chuck and my friend Russell asked if they could watch my presentation, the answer was technically yes.

No WESATOM footage had ever seen the light of day, but I thought that this seemed like as good of a reason as any to make our first release. So I messaged Ed and asked him for the video.

He declined.

You see, Ed has a real problem with crappy video. He doesn’t like it. At all.

So he said that he would edit the video into something that was watchable. And then I could have it.

(At the time, I was pretty incensed with this answer, but ultimately perhaps Mr. Goin was quite prescient.)

The fundamental issue with Ed’s plan is that Metric Visual is busy. So Ed essentially held my video hostage until there was nothing better to do. (Which hopefully was a day that never came.) He claimed to be working on it. But I didn’t really get any evidence that this was true.

Finally, my break came.

In 2016–2017, Ed had an intern that worked for him part of the time, Fanyuan “Big Papa” Qiu. As Big Papa’s time at Metric came to an end, there wasn’t much sense in having her continue with client work. So she had a week to work with Ed to edit my video!

And at the end of July 2017, almost five months since my presentation, I had my video.

I knew Chuck and Russell would be thrilled.

I immediately opened up my Gmail, typed up a witty email, went to attach the video, and….

Right.

You can’t send like 20 Gigs of video over email. The internet would break.

I returned to Ed’s desk to express my discontent. (He expressed similar discontent that he worked with someone who thought you could email a video!) He said that my best option would be file sharing like Dropbox.

After seeing DropBox’s discontent at the size of the file as well, I had no choice but to resort to hosting the video on YouTube.

Now this following statement doesn’t really mean anything, but I’m not really a “YouTube guy.” I don’t even know what that means, but the idea of throwing my rambling onto the web just didn’t seem like my thing. And without all the other WESATOM videos, it was just going to kind of languish out there with no purpose. I needed two people to see this video.

But alas, to YouTube I went. And on August 1st, 2017, I posted a video to my personal account titled Cricket For Americans.

I sent an email to Chuck, an email to Russell, and an email to my family letting them know that they could watch if they pleased.

And that was the end of the story. Until I got that email.

I’ve never met Harris Abilash. And I probably never will. I don’t know the first thing about the guy. But for some reason, our internet fates were bound to be intertwined.

When I woke up that Saturday morning and read that email, my first reaction was confusion. And after confusion, certainly humor. How the hell did Harris Abilash find my video? And did he watch the whole thing? Wtf.

I hadn’t logged into YouTube since the 1st, so I thought that would be a reasonable place to start, no? And when I logged on, I was tickled yet again. My video had 171 views.

Now that was a real coup I thought. For no reason other than file size limits, 171 people had seen me ramble about cricket. Awesome.

Little did I know what was about to happen.

The week that followed was a bit of a blur honestly. Every day I would wake up and there would just be more views and more comments. It was an out-of-body experience. My understanding of the world was being rewritten with every minute. It just didn’t seem right.

The story got even more amazing as I dove into the analytics. It turns out that I had accidentally created one of the most watchable videos ever. In that first week, a whopping 22% of viewers watched the entire video! That’s right. Over one in five viewers sat through the entire hour. No wonder YouTube’s algorithm was impressed. My traffic was about a two-thirds from India, which was hilarious as well. Why would Indians care about an explanation about how to play cricket? (I still don’t know the answer to this one…)

But in a week, I went from a view chart like this…

To this…

(Aren’t y-axes a hilarious thing?)

By the afternoon of September 1st, I had garnered just over 2,500 views. I was out of sorts.

As I sat at my desk on that Friday afternoon, I couldn’t really keep my shit together. All these things which I had never thought about before were at my doorstep simultaneously.

To be completely honest, I felt very uncomfortable. You know that old “act like you’ve been there before?” Yeah. I couldn’t.

And if the last week wasn’t enough, the week after got even weirder. Over Labor Day weekend, I found myself completely single-minded. (I even wrote the beginning of this article!)

I could not think about anything else. And as I became all-consumed with the video, it appeared that the world was becoming all-consumed as well.

By September 5th, the view chart looked like this:

14,000 views, which was pretty sweet I thought until one of our interns piped up out of nowhere:

“It just hit Reddit”

I guess I always imagined that I would do something that would be “Reddit-Worthy” at some point in my life. I never imagined, however, that the subreddit that would lead to my 15 minutes of fame would be /r/Cricket.

But lo and behold, on the afternoon of September 6th, Redditor wicketkeeper posted my video to Reddit.

It was official:

I had become the fastest growing American Cricket personality in the history of the world

When you look at what happened from there, it’s the agony and the ecstasy.

I never saw the same success as I did on September 6th. But to think that there was a single day in world history where >5,000 people watched a 67 minute lecture I gave on the rules of cricket still sounds unbelievable.

But of course all good things must come to an end. And as the YouTube algorithm tired of my video, I settled down to an average of a couple to a few hundred views / day. (Something that continues to this day…)

The cumulative view count graph follows an awfully familiar shape.

And it all started with some man I’ve never met making a simple and docile comment.

While I know not what will become of my career as America’s fastest growing cricket personality or a YouTube sensation with 177 subscribers, I’m grateful that for a few short weeks the world watched as I rambled. If you ever want to talk Bradman or Googlies, you know where to find me.

For media inquiries or custom autographs, please contact me at elinrobinson at gmail.com

Some additional fun stats from Youtube —