Several hundred thousand people have already watched funny videos about the life of one yellow gopher from Kazakhstan on YouTube. And all because the cute animal chose the famous Baikonur cosmodrome as its habitat.
The gopher's path to Internet stars began when a young man named Alexander - on YouTube his nickname malygin - was sent a video filmed at Baikonur. For several hours, the camera of the cosmodrome recorded the behavior of a yellow gopher caught in the lens. Apparently, the employees of Baikonur deliberately set the camera near the animal's burrow, but it was not possible to find out for certain. Be that as it may, Alexander edited a video about three minutes long, added offscreen music and, under the unpretentious title "Resident of the Baikonur Cosmodrome", posted the resulting story on his YouTube channel.
For two months everything was as usual. The video actually just "hung" until there was an unexpected surge of interest in July. The resulting excitement was a complete surprise for the author of the plot, but a pleasant surprise. "Now the whole world knows about the gopher!" - Alexander justly remarked.
For videos posted on the Internet, such stories are not uncommon. It is enough for the video to catch the eye and seem worthy of attention to a member of some large community (a group on a social network, for example) or to a Twitter user with a large number of followers. He will post a link in a group or in his microblog, and many people will immediately see the video. And then the viral spreading method is triggered - "likes", "retweets", buttons "tell friends" and so on.
The funny resident of the cosmodrome scored several hundred thousand views in just a matter of days. The media started talking about the animal from Baikonur. They began to write about him, there were stories on television. To the original video was added another, longer - about 8 minutes - "Gopher at the Start" from the user tvroskosmos, which also became very popular. The YouTube star can now be seen on other resources as well. Video clips of various lengths with the participation of the same gopher, and with names in different languages, have been posted on the Internet. Users around the world are actively commenting on the probable fate of the animal and managed to come up with many nicknames for it. Among them: "Cosmosusl", "Agent", "Saboteur".
Who knows, a new Internet meme might be around the corner? Time will tell.
