Viral selfie could make $250,000 to boot
Jared Frank, a Canadian traveller who attained Internet fame by getting kicked in the head, will be well compensated for his embarrassing lesson in train safety.
On Monday the 22-year-old signed on with Jukin Media, a California-based company that licenses viral content and boasts thousands of videos in its library. CBC News reports the Regina man could make as much as $250,000 from the clip, which already has been watched more than 23 million times on YouTube.
Frank was backpacking in Peru and wanted to capture a quick video of himself in front of a passing train but didn’t realize how quickly the locomotive was travelling — or how close he was to the tracks.
Before he could react, the boot of the train conductor got him in the side of the head.
“Wow, that guy kicked me in the head,” he said in the video.
The 10-second clip quickly went viral, partly out of schadenfreude and partly out of suspicion the whole thing had been staged.
But Frank outed himself a couple of days later.
“The first time I was walking, the train went past us extremely slowly because there are so many tourists,” Frank told Postmedia News.
“But on the way back, we heard the train coming again and I figured I could film me standing there and the train going behind me. What I didn’t know was that this time it was going full-on normal train speed.”
He said he wasn’t hurt, although his ego may have been a tad bruised. In any case, the money will help him cope. Frank said he has been promised from $2 to $16 per 1,000 views of his video.
At the rate the selfie is racking up views online, that could be a lot of dough for a boot to the head.