If you haven't heard about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge by now, what have you been doing with your days if not watching your friends and celebrities squirm after being doused in frigid ice water?
The social media campaign to raise money for ALS research swept the nation and was a resounding success for the cause as of Aug. 27, raising $94.3 million since it began on July 29. That's compared to $2.7 million in donations during the same time last year.
Aside from monetary donations, it's really hard to measure the success of this campaign. Part of the goal was to raise awareness of this debilitating and ultimately life-threatening disease, which one would imagine has been accomplished to a degree given the viral nature of the Ice Bucket Challenge. However, there's really no concrete way to measure this intangible concept.
Something that could help us better understand the reach of the Ice Bucket Challenge is how much time we have dedicated to watching the videos since the campaign began. Vocativ recently collected data on this and compared it to last year's viral video sensation, "The Harlem Shake."
Vocativ started by scraping YouTube for videos that contained the keywords "ALS Ice Bucket Challenge" and "Harlem Shake," not counting duplicates. Using the sum of the total views of each clip and the average length of time for each type of video, they found that we've spent 268.7 years watching Ice Bucket Challenge videos and a whopping 5,979 years viewing "Harlem Shake" videos.
Now that's kind of depressing, isn't it? We didn't devote as much time to watching videos aimed at raising awareness for a terrible disease as we did watching people dance ridiculously to a dubstep beat. Ah, the age we live in.
One explanation for this may be that "Harlem Shake" videos had the ability to be more creative and thus a single person could have watched a greater number of them. The song may have remained the same, but you could have worn crazy outfits, switched up the dance moves or danced in a totally unexpected place to differentiate your video from the next. However, the Ice Bucket Challenge videos only have one main element that you can't really deviate from, or else it wouldn't be the Ice Bucket Challenge.
However, as Vocativ points out, the Ice Bucket Challenge has been more popular in terms of Google searches, so that's something to be proud of. The charitable campaign also hasn't inspired as much controversy as "The Harlem Shake" videos, which some criticized for making a mockery of the original dance's cultural meaning. The Ice Bucket Challenge, on the other hand, has been much more universally liked.
Unfortunately, just as people eventually stopped making "Harlem Shake" videos, the popularity of the Ice Bucket Challenge is now on the decline. We're all just hoping the message of the meme lives on.
