The video helped give rise to one of the unlikeliest success stories on YouTube. 8, 2017, it has earned over 21 million views. The resulting video - entitled "I COUNTED TO 100000!" - was a viral smash. It was an oddly mesmerizing performance, the kind of thing every kid in elementary school thinks about but never tries. At the end of the exhausting stunt, he looked deliriously at the camera. Donaldson sat down in a chair and, for the the next 40-plus hours, murmured one number after the next, starting from zero and continuing all the way to 100,000. Then, one day, he was struck with an idea for a video that he was sure would work. "I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life," Donaldson recalled during a recent interview. They gave one another YouTube-related homework assignments, and they pestered successful channels for data about their most successful posts. They conducted daily phone calls to analyze what videos went viral. In the months that followed, Donaldson and a handful of his friends tried to crack the code. But he was convinced he was close to unlocking the secrets of YouTube's algorithm, the black box of rules and processes that determines what videos get recommended to viewers. In the fall of 2016, Jimmy Donaldson dropped out of college to try to solve one of the biggest mysteries in media: How exactly does a video go viral on YouTube? Donaldson, then 18, had been posting to the site since he was 12 without amassing much of an audience.
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