Laowai Style has really taken off! Firstly, I’ve been feature on China Personified, where I have been contributing the comedy blog for the last month or so. The founder of CP, Mable Chan, has been very supportive and is working hard on my (and CP’s) behalf to see if we can make something more of this video… and possibly make even more like it!
China Personified’s post of my video is here!
But that’s not all! A reporter at Tech in Asia wrote a piece about me that was picked up by Yahoo! News Singapore and Phillippines. Additionally, The CFO Daily Report posted an article and so did the Haohaoreport. Even Reddit’s r/china boards had things to say about the video!
Perhaps the ultimate sign that China believes you’ve made something valuable is the immediate and total violation of any IP rights associated with your work. A video search on Baidu (Chinese google) shows that there are perhaps dozens of postings of my video on all sorts of video sites… all but one of which were uploaded by random people. My own rights to the Gangnam Style music are fair use, so power to the people who are trying to snipe views—I will take it as a sign that I’m making it!
With almost a quarter million views, I’m not sure exactly what to think. One of my fellow China Personified bloggers, Dillon, sent me an email with a line that made me pause. He said to me, “I’ve also decided that with this silly video, you’ve reached more people than most Fulbright projects ever. Just a thought.”
Sure, the impact on each one of those people was probably pretty fleeting. But a fleeting influence multiplied by a quarter million instances is nothing to scoff at… I’m feeling very proud of my work so far on this project, and, if some of the stuff in the pipeline comes through, there may be even more that comes from the video going forward!