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Jeff Houghton and his team’s “Instagram Husband” parody video has generated over 4.4 million views on YouTube, and media stories from across the country.
Jeff Houghton and his team’s “Instagram Husband” parody video has generated over 4.4 million views on YouTube, and media stories from across the country.

A case study in going viral: 'Instagram Husband'

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Jeff Houghton could have guessed he had something good when his show’s video was trending on Facebook ahead of Donald Trump and Wal-Mart on Dec. 14. After his social satirical video took flight and singer Nicki Minaj shared it, Houghton invited her to Christmas dinner in Iowa.

It’s been that kind of month for Houghton and crew with Springfield’s late-night television talk show, “The Mystery Hour.”

“I haven’t heard back,” he said of Minaj.

He owes the attention from Minaj and plenty of others to the creation of “Instagram Husband,” which pokes fun at husbands who essentially serve as “human selfie sticks” for their wives’ social media posts. After its Dec. 8 debut on YouTube, the 2-minute, 44-second video had been watched over 4.4 million times as of 9:04 a.m. Dec. 21.



The skit features Houghton and his wife Michelle, as well A Beautiful Mess lifestyle blogger Emma Chapman and her husband Trey George, not to mention Nick Black, with a twitchy eye. The guys play husbands struggling to cope with their wives’ addiction to posting photos on social media app Instagram.

The video – shot and edited by Brandon Goodwin with Springfield-based Neighbor Studios – was filmed at several Springfield locations, including behind the Heer’s building downtown.  

“We used to eat our food. Now, we just take pictures of it,” George says in the video.

The story of the video’s appeal has been carried by the likes of People Magazine, Time, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine and Adweek, among others.  

Houghton also has talked to international media.

“I had an interview with BBC,” he said. “There was some Norwegian publication. I haven’t seen that one. I did ‘Weekend Sunrise,’ which is an Australian version of the ‘Today’ show. I might do a Polish version of it. Some Irish radio station reached out. I haven’t reached back out. It’s nuts.”

But is it bringing in cash?

No notable cash to speak of yet – the show has sold about 25 shirts online – but Houghton said he’s planning to talk to an intellectual property attorney. Houghton recently asked a woman running the video without permission – a practice called freebooting – to take it off her public Facebook page. Her repost, he said, picked up 6 million views.

Shawn Kober, owner of Camdenton-based video-production company Big Planet Media, has been down the viral-video road before.

As an owner of Lake TV – an independent television station broadcasting on Charter Cable and CoMo Connect in the Lake of the Ozarks area – his company had film rolling when a seven-person boating accident occurred.

Lake TV’s original news report from three years ago, which included Kober’s footage, has garnered over 4.5 million views, but many people have reposted portions of the crash in different formats. For example, YouTube poster TDFWFail put together a “Bikini Girls Boat Crash Remix” that has drawn over 8.3 million views.

“It had fast power boats and girls in bikinis. I think that’s why it went viral,” Kober said.

When Lake TV’s video came out, it didn’t catch on with people in the United States, though. It became popular overseas first.

“I was getting calls from Iceland, Finland and Germany. The next was the ‘Today’ show and ‘Good Morning America’ started calling,” he said. “It was pretty dramatic. Everybody got hurt, but nobody knows that online. They think they fell down, but in reality they went to the hospital and there were broken bones and fractures and stuff.”

Kober has reached out to Houghton on Facebook to suggest there are ways from keeping “Instagram Husband” from being stolen. YouTube, he said, pays fractions of a penny per view for monetized accounts, which can pile up into significant cash when millions of views are realized.

He said Lake TV signed up with a division of Los Angeles-based Jukin Media, which works to identify unauthorized republished videos.

“There are companies out there that have algorithms that track all that stuff. They can track the audio or key points on the video, so if you have images that look the same, they will recognize it. Once it is recognized, they can disable the video of the person who doesn’t have the right to put it up or you can get credit for all those hits,” Kober said.

He sold the crash clip to several media outlets, including CNN, and to the producers of “Ridiculous” on MTV, which generated over $10,000 in all. The company also made a couple thousand dollars from YouTube and split the money from recovered views through Jukin Media.

“It was nice little checks here and there,” he said.

Houghton said InstagramHusband.com was set up in anticipation of some popularity in hopes of promoting the show.

“It’s the first thing we really tried to do that had some universal appeal,” he said of the video. “But, of course, nothing like this. A lot of stuff we do is real specific to this area.”

He said the website was up to catch traffic, and by Dec. 17, there had been roughly 800,000 hits.

And then there are the phone calls from nonmedia. Houghton, an Iowa-native who lived in Hollywood briefly before returning to Springfield, said he’s garnered some interest from agents and producers with questions about the show. Still, it’s not clear where that attention could lead.

“I know from being out in Hollywood, that doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “People have been asking me what my goals are. I think the goals remain the same. My ultimate goal would be to have a nationally syndicated talk show from here. Whether or not that’s feasible is always the question.

“What this has done, if we were taking everything one or two steps at a time, is it puts us 12 steps forward from where we thought we’d be by now.”

While “Instagram Husband” is generating new fans, Kober said it was probably great publicity for the social-media app as well.

“Instagram should really be paying them,” he said.

On the social media site, #instagramhusband has been tagged in over 7,100 posts.

“The Mystery Hour” airs Saturdays on Fox KRBK and recently was syndicated to Fox 14 in the Joplin market. It is filmed live at Gillioz Theatre.

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