September 2017 – Geneva:
a fascinating and incredible street theater production – 2 years of preparation and a whole city “mobilized” to make it possible. But also “immobilized” as traffic flows and public transport totally interrupted for a whole weekend, stranding many inhabitants and inconveniencing others.
The “show” began Friday evening and ended Sunday afternoon – each part was a themed section of a continuing story, but at the “show” level there was no need to fully know or understand the underlying saga.

But perhaps even more interesting is the almost 10,000 hits of the first video – 3000 of them already on the first day. The second video, filmed the following day and uploaded within hours struggled to reach a few hundred hits within a week. The third one – well far fewer hits but admittedly is not as exciting as the first two.

So let’s offer a theory as to why the first video became so popular so quickly:

Once the first video content was captured (Saturday) it was edited and uploaded – so quickly in fact that the only sound track was that of the camera mics picking up the actors, the crowd, and music from loudspeakers in the procession.
And that is from where this theory stems. YouTube flagged the music as copyright on several sections – but with a caveat that all is ok, we simply see publicity as our work is being “monetized” – supposedly to the credit of the performers or the copyright holders of the music. So it was left that way. Videos 2 & 3 have royalty-free music added, no copyright music at all.

[We have never before maintained a public video on-line with a copyright flag – often YouTube flags our classical music recordings because their software is protecting performance more than composition. Then all we do is file an on-line dispute which resolves the claim.]

Well, the hits began – so quickly that we wonder if all those hits were real or rather fabricated somehow in the early hours to entice real hits such that the advertising would pay off.
Voilà, that is our little conspiracy theory – and driven by the comparison with video 2, no copyright, no advertising.
We have difficulty believing that the huge difference of hits is caused by it being one day later or it being so much less well-produced than the first.

We probably will never know.