When I was 15, some friends and I were on an organized retreat in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. One of us had just gotten a new digital camera so we were filming pretty much everything. This wound up happening.
After flipping out at the time, then finding out that light cover cost about $5 (apparently the hotel plans for things like that; who knew?), we uploaded it, showed all our friends, and it got like 2,000 views the first month and then pretty much stopped. The incident happened in January 2006. Fast forward to around New Year's 2014, I happened to be scrolling deep into the AskReddit threads one night and there was a question like "What's something that makes you laugh every time?" So I linked our video, and fell asleep five minutes later.
I woke up six hours later to a friend -- who knew my user name -- blowing up my phone because he'd seen my post near the top of the thread when it hit the front page, and I'd already been gilded five times. I got really excited and texted my friends who were in the video to check out the views on the video. Over the rest of the day, we watched as it went from about 2,400 views to over 280,000 by the end of the night. It wound up being ranked the No. 1 comedy video on YouTube for that day, and I think stayed in the top 10 for a couple more days. Quite a few friends, real life and Facebook, messaged me about it, but that was it at first.
Then MTV contacted the owner of the channel about using it in whatever their Tosh.0 ripoff was, but they wanted him to sign away the entire rights, so he passed on that. He submitted it to AFV instead, where it was entered and included in one of those montages they do. A bunch of older people from my hometown saw that one, and we got a lot of messages there. Then towards the end of the year, some Vine/Instagram guy that apparently goes around pulling funny stuff from AFV and uploads it to his profile took the AFC clip and retitled it something like "Kevin's a Thug," and it got huge this time, with millions of views on Vine, and tens of thousands of shares, if not more.
Unfortunately, that's about all that's happened. Every couple of months, it gets re-uploaded somewhere, or someone puts it in a new video, and we get a bunch of notifications about it again, but since my friend wound up putting it in the public domain, we never got anything out of it. I did read a lot of YouTube comments though. Made me feel much better about my life, if that can be considered a direct result.