YOUTUBE STARDOM...EH KINDA...

So yesterday was indeed an interesting day. YouTube launched in Ireland, and BalconyTV was the main (and still is) featured video on the page. This was something we were excited about for ages...the very idea of being on YouTubes main page, was driving our marketing peeps into excitement overdrive. Ofcoarse we don't have marketing peeps, but if we did...sure it would be grand.

The video itself - titled aptly WELCOME TO YOUTUBE IRELAND, was put together in the minimum of time. We kept it as simple as possible. Grand...fine...no messing...in...out...tell them what were are all about...That was the name of the game.

Alas, things didn't quite work out as planned. Because you see...we started getting comments. Bad comments. Very bad comments.

Clearly loads and loads and loads of people don't know what BalconyTV is yet...and watching a random 59 second video of some guy (our Tom) shouting WELCOME YOUTUBE TO IRELAND was a bit of a mystery to some.

They had the following complaints...

1/ Tom and Pauline have American accents...

2/ They don't represent Irish people...

3/ BalconyTV makes them ashamed to be Irish...

4/ YouTube has been in Ireland since it began, whats the point of this...

The comments piled one on top of the other. Mindlessly critical...but I had no problem, as I figured it was understandable that some people might not get BalconyTV based on that clip.

But then the comments became more sinister.

'If I see you on Dame Street I'll bleedin kill you'

'Why don't you jump off the Balcony and die'

'Is this a school for fagots'

And they just got worse and worse. People were coming back again and again piling vile hatred blocks one on top of the other. Each one worse, jsut for the sake of it.

It was completly nuts. A tad disturbing. And the huge irony of it all...a very worrying portrait of some of the people that live in modern Ireland. With people like that out there...is there any hope?

So at about 9 o' clock last night, I stopped seeing the fun side of it. I deleted all the comments.

Still 12000+ plus views aint bad. It's our second most successful show!