BFDI's Road to Half a Billion Views/Transcript

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Hey everyone! Firey here. First thing, I want to say thank you to all you viewers for sticking with the BFDI community for 10 whole years! It's been a decade since Flower pushed me off that balance beam!

(offscreen) Clumsy.

Now, as you all know, I loovvee tinkering around with gadgets. So, I built myself a replica of the Announcer!

Tennis Ball holds up the TB Speaker Box

What do you mean "replica"? I am the original.

You hear that? That means it's working properly.

But Tennis Ball, I am not an "it".

Anyway, let's have my Announcer give you a guided tour of our road to half a billion views on YouTube. Take it away, TB Speaker Box.

Camera pans to TB Speaker Box

Alright, Tennis Ball. So as many of you know, our creators Cary and Michael were born on March 18th, 1997.

Labeled images of Cary and Michael with "March 18, 1997" below them on screen

Ten years later, they were inspired by this Rube Goldberg video by xefpatterson to make their own Rube Goldberg video. And thus, we say hello to the BeiBei Squisher.

Clips of "CIMOC Contraption 3" by xefpatterson and "The BeiBei Squisher" by jacknjellify on screen

Which was uploaded on February 6th, 2008. A whole 3 seconds of contraption mayhem, let's see how many views this video got after its release on 3, 2, 1, go.

Screen cuts to a line graph showing the date, jacknjellify videos, and views.

Michael's 4th grade animation for the reflections art contest, called "I Can Make a Difference" is uploaded to YouTube one year after creation.

Michael and Cary graduate from elementary school.

Cary creates his first serious animation, "X Finds Out His Value", for pre-algebra class.

The cyan square in the upper left shows the progress to the next million views.

During the summer break after 6th grade, Michael and Cary devise the concept of BFDI, an animated web-series based off of Survivor and Total Drama.

After roughly 250 hours of work, the 17-minute first episode of BFDI is released.

Cary's Scale of the Universe goes viral on Newgrounds.

Michael and Cary turn 13 years old, the minimum age for a YouTube account. Shh...

BFDI's first voter, Jaysillyboy, also recommends BFDI's first recommended character, Bomby.

For the first time, an episode receives more than 100 votes.

Inanimate Insanity, a show inspired by BFDI, is started by Adam Katz and friends.

The Huang twins enter highschool as hacking, episode deletion, and impersonation controversies plague the object show community.

After 25 episodes, BFDI's first season ends.

Cary's Scale of the Unverse 2 goes viral and ends up on NASA's website.

YouTube's algorithm shifts its focus from view counts to watch time.

Season two begins. Later, Michael releases all BFDI episode source files to the public.

BFDI releases its first game: BFDIA 5b, made with Macromedia Flash 8.

As Cary solves his first Rubiks cube, Katyj98 hosts the first object-con via livestream.

Soon after BFDIA 5e is released, junior year begins, which is so busy that BFDI goes on hiatus for 3 years.

Our Google AdSense account gets disabled for reasons not explained to us. All future revenue is cancelled indefinitely. That's some real life budget cuts.

Abacaba, our data visualization channel, is created.

Cary gets accepted into Stanford University.

Michael and Cary graduate from highschool.

As Michael releases his first .IOS app, Cary starts Ten Words of Wisdom and the jacknjellify hiatus ends.

YouTube takes down episode 1b for 3 days.

Michael makes a video about our AdSense banned that gets to the front page of Reddit.

After talking to a Google employee, who saw Michael's video, our AdSense account is reinstated.

The only episode of IDFB is released.

After defeating Pokémon and others in Wikia's Battle of Fantasy Foods, real life Yoylecake from BFDI is served at New York Comic Con 2016.

The least viewed BFDI season 1 episode surpasses the marble race.

Michael and Satomi animate the first episode of BFDI's fourth season, BFB, which is released on November 3rd, 2017.

The first Los Angeles Object Show Meetup brings in 250 people.

BFB 12 is the first jacknjellify video to get on trending.

81 volunteers reanimate the first BFDI episode.

Open Source Objects, a collaborative object show with 749 writers, voice actors, artists, and animators, begins.

Firey plushies are unveiled at BFDI and II's 2019 meetup and sell out in 90 minutes.

Scholastic's BFDI book is published.

BFDI celebrates its 10th birthday as it reaches 500 million views.

Here we are at the present day. Let's zoom in vertically so we can see the 48 views that BeiBei Squisher got in its first two months.

Graph fades into a solid background. On-screen text appears, it reads: "After its entire first year, BFDI 1a only received 7,301 views. Now, it has 59,016,288."

Text changes to: "If you are an aspiring artist creating your own object show, do not give up! As you have seen, achieving your goals can come slowly but surely."

Text changes to: "Even if you're not in the object show community, if you want to work with us, feel free to reach out! mike@jacknjellify.com We're always open to trying new endeavors."

Screen cuts back to Tennis Ball.

One last thing: This video was made in collaboration with Abacaba. He's great at data visualization, you should check out his channel!

But Tenny Bally, isn't he... You?

Aren't you... *grabs a piece of paper and draws on it* Imaginary?

Tennis Ball holds the paper, which reads 2 = -1, next to X, making X start to disappear.

Aah! W-wai-wait no! *voice fading out* Nononono, no don't do that! Nononono- *continues, indistinct*

X disappears completely.

Anyway guys, see ya later!

Video fades into a solid background. On-screen text appears, it reads: "Once again, thanks for being part of our YouTube journey for ten years! This has been a Cary production. Many thanks to Michael, Satomi, Dunkel, Amor , Pokey and others :)"

Text appears: "(All data came from YouTube Analytics) (Also... yes, Abacaba is one of my other channels.)"

Abacaba intro plays.