With summer starting to wind down my dreams of being on safari in South America are starting to occupy my mind more and more. This reminded me of a remarkable video I saw on YouTube several months ago; in traditional viral fashion (Hey did you see this video yet?? Spam spam spam!). The video showcases an epic battle of nature caught on tape (perfect for a show on Fox) of the daily struggles of a socially outgoing buffalo calf.

The Battle at Kruger was so popular that it actually was made into a National Geographic special, which first aired on May 11th, 2008. This can certainly explain the third spike in web surfers looking for the video online but I am personally chalking the first two up to internet fascination at its finest. Here is a breakout showing the number of people who viewed the video since it was first posted. You will also notice a line that shows how much time the average person watched the video but we’ll get to that soon.

As the story goes, a cute buffalo calf, on a clear sunny day and without a care in the world, wandered away from its herd and down a seemingly harmless dirt path seconds before it was ambushed by… Actually, I think it is more of an adolescent buffalo who is struggling to find its identity through rebellion. Anyway, it gets attacked by a pride of lionesses. Helpless and without any facial or other body piercings for the lionesses the choke on, the buffalo looks like it’s in pretty bad shape but it won’t go down without a fight…

I realize I just left you hanging and you are probably saying, “Wait wait wait, what happened next??” But in actuality over 60% of the people who watched the video already tuned out by this point. Over the observed period the average person stopped watching somewhere around the massive tug of war, 3 minutes before the day was saved and a full 5 minutes before the end of the video, where if you actually made it that far you were nearing the exciting part of the ‘slow clap.’ Yes it’s a long video, 8 minutes and 23 seconds, which is well above the average American attention span, but come on people this video is one of a kind. Below is the breakout in minutes of how long people spent actually watching the video.

Realizing the success of this video and the buzz (of Serengeti mosquitoes) surrounding it, minds quickly went work trying to tap this potential cash “buffalo” and the domain battleatkruger.com was born. There you could be, among the tens of thousands who have gone to learn more about the video’s back-story, buy high quality pictures of the event and most importantly get your hands on some very swanky merchandise. I am personally rocking the pink “Team Buffalo” shirt in my daily rotation and I encourage you all to buy soon though, Christmas is coming and these are limited production!

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