You must have seen the brilliant Blue Bulls-Hitler parody that did the rounds after the Super 14 Final. We spoke to the guys over at Blatant.co.za, the makers of the video, about its viral success.

When you made the video did you expect it would do so well?

Definitely not. It started as a comment from me to a friend of mine about those Adolph Hitler parody videos and that we could probably do one. He said why didn’t we just try and make one right then and there about the Chiefs-Bulls game.

When did you post the vid on YouTube and when did it start taking off?

We posted it on May the 31st, the day after the Super 14 final. It really started taking off towards the end of the first week. It only had a few hundred hits after the first few days, but then growth was almost exponential from then on for a few days, after which it kept growing, but a bit more slowly.

I saw it picked up on Twitter and some sites blogged about it. Do you know what brought you the most traffic?

Well, the reason for making it, apart from the fact that we thought it was funny, was for it to (hopefully) “go viral” and create a lot of traffic for our blog, Blatant.co.za.

The reason it got talked about on blogs and Twitter is due to some manual labour on our part. We created a link to a page on our blog containing the video and posted it as a comment on as many other blogs that had anything to do with rugby as we could. We also looked up what the more popular blogs in the country are and posted links there.

Soon the blog aggregators were picking up our page as a popular link, which also increased the popularity.

We have been tracking the statistics and the biggest factor here is word of mouth. People send links via email or Facebook to their friends when they see the video and it spreads from there.

How long did it take you to produce the video?

It took a few hours to write the script and another two or three hours to edit the video and insert the subtitles.

What program did you use to do the on-screen text?

We used Adobe Premiere, but you can easily use Windows Movie Maker for such a simple video.

If you look at the comments there are a few people out there that did not quite take it for the comedy it is. Were you surprised?

Not at all. What did surprise us is the extent to which some people thought that the video could possibly be anti-Bulls, when it is so obviously pro. I mean, it’s Adolph Hitler talking here. He’s hardly the best spokesman for anything you’re trying to promote.

The funniest thing we learnt from the experience is that it doesn’t matter what you post on YouTube or a blog, someone will start a flame-war about something. It could be the most benign little movie and someone will pick a fight on the comments section. It’s brilliant.

Who was your stand-out player of the game?

In that game it was Fourie Du Preez. He is a great player.

And your favourite Blue Bull of all time?

Morne Steyn. I have liked him as a player for about four years now. I think he’s a better fly-half than Ruan Pienaar and Francios Steyn and on current form should have started against the Lions. I think he was the Bulls best player this season and, in my opinion, is the best fly-half South Africa has.

Tell us more about Blatant.co.za.

Blatant started out as a domain name a friend of mine bought as he thought it sounded cool. Then a friend of my brother’s, who has an Internet marketing company in Cape Town, said I should just start a blog as “you can write man” (it was at a wedding and he was drunk).

So with some advice from him (when sober) we started a blog about anything and everything that we encounter. It’s supposed to be humorous, edgy, and controversial. There are 4 of us working on it and after the Hitler video we went from the 384th ranked blog in the country to about 90th, within a week (but are now way back down again). But we’ll come up with something else funny, hopefully.