21-year-old Jeff Forde (seen at left) was traveling on the 4 train through Brooklyn earlier this week, dozing off at 2am, when he heard a woman scream. He opened his eyes and saw a rat on the train. The video he subsequently took, first NYC The Blog spoke to Forde on the phone last night about his hectic day spent fielding media requests. This included sending and receiving approximately 500 YouTube messages from media outlets and others, juggling phone calls and negotiating multiple licensing requests for his video. "Man, I been out running around all day going to one interview to the next!" he explained. "I never expected this." He even did an interview with CBS "Inside Edition," who sent a car to retrieve him.
Here's a quick time line of events. Forde uploads the video to YouTube on Wednesday. NYC The Blog features it in a blog post at 7am yesterday morning. The video is shared on most local news websites, including Gothamist, Pat's Papers and The Village Voice, for example. CNN contacted Forde at approximately 11:00am. Within hours, every local television news outlet and most major New York City newspapers reached out to Forde. After getting "about ten requests" for the video, he licensed it to seven media concerns. This basically consisted of paying Forde to provide a copy without a watermark, which Forde's video on YouTube astutely contains. Most outlets, Forde informed, paid $500 for use of the video sans watermark. ABC7 paid $600 and The New York Post paid $250.00 for use of video with watermark and two photos.
What's more, after being approached by a Viral Prints, Forde now has t-shirts available online. As of this morning, the video has almost 500,000 views. And this isn't his first time filming a viral video. In 2009 he to witnessed and filmed a fight in Times Square that was later licensed by TruTv.
Previously:
Subway Riding Rat Wakes Up Sleeping Man By Crawling Up His Face
» Follow NYC The Blog on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit: ABC7/Eyewitness News
Share This
