Geekwire: Matt Harding’s viral YouTube career

In 2003 when Matt Harding quit his job and started dancing
on camera, he didn’t know it would turn into a worldwide
phenomenon. YouTube wouldn’t be invented for another two
years, but digital cameras were getting cheap and he was
traveling the world discovering what his next move would
be.

That next move was a jig.

It all started when he was traveling with a friend and
former co-worker when he was between jobs. When they
visited a major monument in Hanoi, Vietnam, Matt’s friend
told him to dance in front of the monument while he shot a
video.

“It was just an office lunch-time thing where I would go
up to people when it was time to get food and I would
hover over them until they got up to go with me,” Matt
told GeekWire.

After that, Matt started shooting regular videos of
himself dancing in front of major international landmarks
and uploaded the clips to his website, Wheret
hehellisMatt.com.

Matt didn’t think about the videos much until, in 2005, he
discovered someone else had been profiting from his
travels.

A stranger had started uploading Matt’s videos to the
fledgling YouTube site, claiming it as his own content.
The YouTube page directed donors to send money to “Matt
Harding’s paypal account” to support his travels. When
Harding contacted the fraud, he got an offer of five
percent of the profits.

Finding out that someone else was making money from his
travel videos made Matt realize how popular they were, and
that they might even present an opportunity to travel for
a living.

Since 2005, Matt has collected sponsors for his travels
and even makes a little bit of money from YouTube
advertisements on his videos.

“It turned into a sort of business,” said Matt.

Matt started traveling again in 2006, and that’s when he
started to change his video-making strategy.

In Rwanda he couldn’t find any big, recognizable landmarks
to stand in front of, but he did find children that wanted
to dance along with him.

“I’ve been doing this wrong the whole time,” he thought.

Matt found that more and more people had started not only
watching his videos, but dancing along with them.

In 2008, Matt started to include others in his videos,
dancing his signature jig with excited children from the
Solomon Islands, native tribal dancers from Papua New
Guinea, and many others.

He considers his latest video, released this year, as his
masterpiece.

For Matt it was a landmark video, charting his visit to
his hundredth country. He also started learning new dances
from the people he met in every country and performing the
new footwork in each video clip. The 2012 video features
over 40 countries, representing every continent but
Antarctica. Matt even made it to Pyongyang, North Korea.

What’s next? People tell Harding that he should get his
own travel show, or start some sort of consulting company.
He doesn’t like that idea. His non-traditional, non-nine-
to-five gig that he’s been doing for seven years is more
than fulfilling.

“I don’t want to change it. I love it,” said Matt.

Listen to the full interview: