Chapter 15 : Copycats

Chapter 15: Chapter 15 : Copycats

Hollis B14 had been the photo club’s darkroom, and it still smelled like one. Three years empty, and the sour bite of fixer still hit you the second the door opened. A red safelight hung from the ceiling. A row of sinks ran along one wall, the faucets rusted too stiff to turn.

Noah spent a weekend turning it into an office. Two old doors laid across the sinks made a desk. Three chairs that didn’t match came back from a thrift store. A corkboard went up on the wall. On the door he taped a sheet of printer paper he’d typed up in Word: MRPELICAN LLC. Seventy-two point, bold, centered.

Noah had just pressed the last thumbtack into the corkboard when somebody shouldered the door open. Mac squeezed in sideways, a box of Pelican Pizza in each hand. Sal had heard he was coming to sign today and wouldn’t let him out of the shop without them.

The company’s first contract got signed right there on the door-desk. Three pages. Ethan had typed it up in the library computer lab the night before.

Page one was money. Two hundred dollars guaranteed for every video he appeared in. If a sponsor came in on a video he was in, fifteen percent of that check was his. The term was one year, renewable if both sides still wanted it.

Page two was the rules. For that year, any video Mac showed his face in online was a MrPelican video, and anybody else who came calling went through Ethan first. The footage belonged to the company. The name Mac, and the guy who answered to it, belonged to Mac. If he ever wanted out, he gave thirty days’ notice and walked out with himself. The footage stayed.

Nobody was signing deals like this in 2006. Three or four years from now, a crop of companies would spring up around L.A. whose whole business was signing kids with cameras and putting them under one roof. They’d call themselves multi-channel networks. Some of them turned their people into stars. Some tied them up for five years with a single signature. Ethan had seen both kinds, which was why page three of his was for Mac.

Page three had no clauses on it. Just three lines in Ethan’s handwriting.

This year: regular cast. You’re in every video, until three million people know who the big guy is. Next spring: your own series, a whole video on your shoulders. The year after: your own channel, under the MrPelican banner. The ad money splits, and you get the bigger half.

Mac read the third line, then read it again. "My own channel?" He looked up. "Hold on. Doesn’t YouTube pay exactly nothing?"

"Not yet," Ethan said. "But the morning they start, I want a few hundred thousand people already sitting on your channel waiting. Everybody else’ll be scrambling for their first subscriber. You’ll be cashing checks."

Mac flipped back to page one and read the whole thing again, lips moving. When he was done, he asked exactly one question.

"Do I get a jersey?"

"You will."

"XXL." He signed, his name twice the size of the box again. "XXXL works too. I’m still growing."

The ink was barely dry, and they were only on the second slice, when a wail came from the direction of Noah’s laptop. Technically it came from Noah.

He turned the screen around. The YouTube search box said last to let go $1000, and the results ran four pages deep without hitting bottom.

Arizona State, a crowd with their hands on a pickup truck. A college in Ohio, hands on a surfboard. A fraternity at UT Austin, hands on a seven-foot inflatable banana. Every title was longer than the one before it, and every single one had $1,000 in it.

"One week," Noah said. "Thirty-seven of them. I counted."

Mac leaned in, watched for a bit, and broke into a grin. "They’re copying us? Then don’t I get royalties or something?"

"How are you laughing?" Noah scrolled down the page. Two hundred views. Eight hundred. Eleven hundred. The best of them, nineteen hundred. "The format’s dead. People have watched thirty-seven crowds hug a banana. Why would they watch number thirty-eight? Whatever we shoot next, they’re going to go, oh, this again."

Ethan was still working on a mouthful of pizza and didn’t rush to answer. He swallowed first.

"All thirty-seven, added up. How many views?"

Noah worked it out on a napkin. "A little over forty thousand."

"And our two?"

"The first one, three point one million. The reveal, two point six."

Noah clicked over to their own channel while he was at it. MrPelican across the top, and under it in small type: Subscribers: 41,206. Last Monday it had been just over thirty thousand. That made them number one on YouTube’s Most Subscribed This Month, and number nine on the all-time list. For a channel barely two weeks old.

"Then nobody’s sick of the format. They’re sick of bad videos." Ethan dropped his crust back into the box. "You’re right to worry, though. They’ll get better. Sooner or later one of them gets it right. So we’d better figure out what they’re getting wrong before they do."

Right then the door opened. Maya came in with a stack of printouts, saw the room full of people and pizza, and paused in the doorway.

All week the two of them had traded a few lines about work on AIM, nothing more. This was the first time since Monday she’d been in the same room with him.

She walked over to the desk and set the printouts down, but her hand stayed on the stack, fingertips pinning down the corner of the top page. She didn’t sit, and she didn’t look Ethan’s way.

Ever since that night she’d run into Chloe, she’d rehearsed what to say a dozen times. "I was out of line" sounded like a legal statement. "Forget the upstairs, downstairs thing" would just remind him how ugly it had been. In the end she’d thrown out every version.

"The player data," she said. "You asked for it last week."

Ethan looked at her. He hadn’t forgotten what Chloe had said last Tuesday over a cup of yogurt. He wanted to ask, but the room was full. Mac had a mouthful of pizza, and nobody’s ears were sharper than Noah’s. Ask her what was going on in front of the two of them, and she’d probably turn around and walk out.

"Thanks." He slid one of the pizza boxes toward her. "Grab a slice first. Sal made it himself, and it’s free today. Don’t count on that happening twice."

Mac gave up his chair and leaned back against the sinks. Maya murmured a thanks, sat down, and took a slice. Noah’s eyes went back and forth between the two of them twice. His mouth opened halfway, then closed again.

Mac noticed nothing at all and passed her a napkin.

Maya got through half a slice, then spread the printouts across the desk. What she’d brought was the back end of the website’s video player.

She’d built that Flash player in her first week, staying up all night to do it. Every time somebody closed the video, the server logged which second they’d reached. Of the first video’s three point one million plays, more than four hundred thousand had happened on the site. She’d rolled all four hundred thousand of those records up by the second and turned them into a single line.

Ethan had borrowed a projector from Sam at the media building. It had cost him a box of donuts. For the first time, the darkroom’s best feature paid off. With the lights out, not one speck of daylight got in.

The line went up on the white wall.

Maya had translated the line into plain English. Say a hundred people click play. Five seconds in, ninety-four are still watching. At two minutes, eighty-one. Between five and a half and six and a half minutes it drops the hardest, eleven gone in one go. After that, hardly anyone leaves. Fifty-two make it all the way to the end. The one strange spot was at four fifteen. Instead of sloping down, the line bulged up into a spike.

"What’s that spike?" Noah asked.

"People dragged back and watched it again," Maya said. "The water part. The average viewer watched it one point four times."

Mac put his slice down. "So this line is..."

"A heart monitor for a video," Ethan said. "Where people leave, where people stay, it’s all right there."

He pointed at the stretch around five and a half minutes. "This is where we didn’t cut hard enough. Two hours of standoff, people standing on a stage not moving, and I got it down to one minute. Still too long. Next time, a stretch like that doesn’t get one second."

Noah blinked. He’d assumed Ethan was going to use the line to brag.

"Problem is," Noah said, "we can’t get their numbers."

"So we become the audience." Ethan switched the projector cable over to Noah’s laptop. "Everybody put one hand flat on the table. The second you’d close the video, take your hand off."

Mac looked down at his hand, then back up at Ethan. "This again?"

"Reverse rules. Whoever wants to leave lets go first."

First up was the Arizona State pickup. It opened on a guy in sunglasses talking into the lens. "What’s up, YouTube, so a couple days ago we saw this video..."

Maya’s hand was off the table at four seconds.

"When he said What’s up, YouTube," she said.

Noah made it to fifteen. Mac made it to twenty-two, and the guy in the sunglasses was still explaining the rules.

The second was the surfboard in Ohio. The shot was the backs of a lot of heads. Somebody was laughing, and you couldn’t tell at what. Thirty seconds in, Mac was the first one out.

"I don’t even know who I’m supposed to root for," he said.

The third was the banana from Texas, and this one was different. It opened with a heavyset guy in a full banana costume diving onto the banana. The camera whipped around, twenty-some hands slapped down on it at once, and a title popped up. Last one to let go takes home a thousand bucks.

Maya’s hand stayed down until a minute ten.

While he watched, Ethan jotted a name in his notebook.

When the lights came back on, Ethan pinned three sticky notes to the corkboard.

"One. The opening’s too slow." He tapped the first one. "What’s the very first frame of ours?"

"A close-up of cash," Noah said. "Your thumb fanning a stack of twenties. Then smack, the whole stack hits the speaker."

"At three seconds, I’m saying last hand on wins a thousand dollars. By five seconds, you know what this is, what the prize is, and who’s on that stage," Ethan said. "What are they doing at five seconds? Saying hi to YouTube. Viewers don’t owe you a thing. If you don’t hand them a reason to stay in the first five seconds, they click once and they’re gone. No hard feelings."

"Two. The thumbnail." He tapped the second note. "Where does a YouTube thumbnail come from?"

Maya answered right away. "The system grabs the frame from the exact middle of the video."

"Right. So when I cut it, I put the water at four fifteen. The whole thing runs eight and a half minutes. Dead center."

The room went quiet for two seconds.

"You did that on purpose?" Mac’s eyes went wide.

"The night we cut it, the first thing he did was circle that line," Noah said. "I asked him what the circle was for."

"Three million people saw that frame before they ever clicked. A girl dumping a bottle of water over her boyfriend’s head. Would you click on that?" Ethan turned the laptop toward them, still open to the search page with all thirty-seven. "Now look at theirs."

A row of thumbnails. Somebody’s elbow. A patch of sky. The blurry back of a head. One of them had the surfboard in it, but nobody was touching the surfboard. Not one of them showed any money.

Mac stared at the elbow and shook his head. "Bro. Even I wouldn’t click that."

"Three. No people." Ethan tapped the last note. "Thirty-seven videos. Name one person in any of them."

Nobody said a word.

"Ask anybody who watched ours, and they can name four people. The big guy. The couple. The pitcher. The girl who never said a word."

"The big guy has a name," Mac said.

"The big guy has a name." Ethan nodded. "They filmed a bunch of hands. We filmed people. Nobody roots for a hand. They root for a person. When you were up there gritting your teeth, three million people were gritting theirs right along with you."

Mac sat up a little straighter. He kept his mouth shut, but he was clearly loving this.

"So," Ethan said, capping his pen, "they copied the format and missed the rhythm. Hands on a thing, last one to let go wins, anybody can copy that. When to make you laugh, when to make you sweat, and the exact second you finally get to see the water, they haven’t figured that part out yet."

Noah went from one sticky note to the next, all three of them. Then he looked down at the search results. He opened the most-viewed copycat and scrolled to the comments.

Then he laughed.

"Look at this."

The first comment said original is way better lol. The second said go watch the SCU one, trust me. The third one had twenty-some thumbs up. where’s the big guy?? I came here for the big guy.

Mac shot to his feet and jabbed a finger at the screen. "You hear that? You hear that?!"

"So these thirty-seven..." Noah said slowly.

"Are advertising for us. For free," Ethan said. "Under every copycat that flops, somebody’s telling people to go watch the original. The more of them there are, the more the original’s worth."

Noah sank back in his chair and let out a long breath. Whatever had been sitting on his shoulders all afternoon finally let go.

Maya didn’t say anything. She’d drawn a line of her own on the back of a printout, and she kept glancing from the one on the wall to hers and back. The pen in her fingers turned one full circle and stopped.

"For the next one," she said, "I can add something to the player. Every time someone drags back to rewatch a spot, log it separately."

"Down to the second?"

"Down to the half second."

Ethan smiled. "Half second it is."

By the time everyone packed up, it was full dark outside. Mac took the last half box of pizza, saying his roommate could have it for a midnight snack. Noah had a statistics class that night. He ran another strip of tape around the sheet of paper on the door, then grabbed his backpack and ran.

Ethan was in no hurry. He switched off the projector, sat back down at the desk, and opened his notebook.

On the page were five names, jotted down while they went through the thirty-seven videos.

He touched his pen to the page beside each name, first to last, then went back to the top and did it again. He didn’t write anything else.

Something rustled across the room. He looked up.

Maya hadn’t left. The printouts were long since in her bag, but she was still putting her pen away. In it went, then back out again. The zipper stopped halfway.

She parted her lips, then pressed them shut again. What was she supposed to say? She stared down at the half-closed zipper and didn’t move.

Ethan let the quiet sit for a moment.

"She’s not my girlfriend," he said.