Jimmy Kimmel's secrets to a great viral video
- Jimmy Kimmel%27s viral videos have nearly 1 billion views on YouTube
- Wolf video prank during Olympics fooled many TV stations
AUSTIN — Jimmy Kimmel knows a thing or two about viral videos. The Daily Beast calls the ABC late-night comic the "unparalleled king" of getting funny bits from his show to pop online and be shared by millions. There was the teen who twerked and set herself on fire. (She was a stuntwoman.) Or the athlete from the Sochi Winter Olympics who tweeted a video of a wolf roaming her Russian dorm. (It turned out to be a Kimmel prank.)
We met up with Kimmel this week in Austin, where he's staging his show from the South By Southwest conference, to talk about the role technology and the Internet now play in the life of a late-night talk show host.
VIRAL VIDEOS
With nearly 1 billion views for his videos on YouTube, Kimmel is the guy to go to for tips. "If you have an attractive women in the video, it seems to increase the views markedly. It's important to figure out which screen grab you're going to put on the YouTube page, because people will see it and just click it, because we're all animals."
For subject matter, the video of the girl whose twerking ended in flames worked "because people like to see pretty girls; they like to see twerking and accidents; so we put all three things together." Animals, especially puppies, are also good, he says. "If you get any of those elements in a video, it will almost automatically increase their popularity."
HIS DIGITAL DAY
Kimmel wakes up in the morning, checks his e-mail on his Apple MacBook Pro and then heads to the websites of CNN and MSNBC "to see what's happening nationally." When he comes into the office, he and his staff will check out their hometown papers online "to see what's going on in those local markets. If we find any interesting stories that don't make the national news, we'll go with those." A staffer mines many websites, "and we go through good old-fashioned TV, too. That's harder. On the Web, things are kind of curated for you, whereas on TV, you have to sit through a lot to get to you what you need."
TWITTER FEUDS
In September Kimmel told a joke about rapper Kanye West that West didn't like. West responded by starting a Twitter feud with Kimmel, a spat that played itself out with a truce appearance by West on Kimmel's show. Kimmel says he didn't see it coming, but he says the experience was "exciting."
"It's weird. Remember the 'Yo Mama' jokes? Instead of doing them in front of a small group of people, you're doing it in front of an audience of millions. I'm sitting there in my office in Hollywood, and Kanye West is sitting there on his iPhone, and we're communicating with each other from the privacy of our own places."
MEAN TWEETS
A regular segment on Live asks celebrities to read aloud mean Tweets fans have written about them, for comedic effect. "It's funny to see the celebrities reading them, and it reminds people there is a person on the other side."
AUDIENCE INTERACTION
Hearing the feedback is interesting and instructive, he says, but there's a flip side.
"I'll sometimes see when I put something on the air, they're weighing in on whether it's funny or not, within the first 20 seconds of it airing. It's no way to watch something, if you're watching it with evaluating it in mind. This is a new era in which you're not really evaluated on your performance as a whole, as much as now, every sentence is cut to pieces."
FAVORITE APPS
He likes the perennials: Twitter (3.7 million followers) for sending tweets, Instagram (55,000 followers) for sharing photos, Diptic (free; Apple, Android, Windows) for creating photo montages, and ESPN for the latest sports scores. He's also a huge fan of the Shazam app for discovering music. "I use it in stores a lot to hold up to the speaker and order music."
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