Joel catches up with viral sensation Jiemba Sands to talk about his overnight rise to fame which you can imagine, wasn’t easy!!! Jiemba is an old Youth ARC regular with multi-talented skills as an athlete, gymnast, martial artist, stuntman and circus performer who loves making films. He’s been working towards going viral for years!  

What was it that flipped the switch on it all?! Quite literally, a simple flip over a fence!! That video was taken up by over 200,000 followers in just one day!

I knew that entertaining was the thing I wanted to do with my career and I was doing a bit of filming, making, photography, gymnastics, martials arts, tricking, flipping, parkour and even breakdancing at Youth ARC! I guess the thing that worked out for me was the flipping!

Joel: I remember when one night at Youth ARC we were trying to close up and you were there doing a forward flip off your hands, catapulting a basketball from your feet and trying to shoot it in to the hoop from the three point line. It maybe took you 200 tries until you got it in!! But I thought “Man this guy has to get a viral video from this”.

It’s really tricky – no matter how good your video is and when your unknown, you post in online
no-one will really see it. A while back I reposted a couple of my old videos which didn’t get noticed back then, but now that I have this big follow and when I reposted it everyone was like “WOW!” and got the reaction I was hoping for.

Joel:  So how did your video get noticed?

It was kinda funny, because since I was 15 I have been working super hard to get to where I am now. And there I was 20 years old and I kind of gave up. I then got a job in landscaping work and doing a few little videos on the side for fun. Then it was 2 weeks after I started my job when I filmed a fence video where I was doing creative flips over a fence. I posted it that day, went to sleep and woke up the next morning to see I had 60,000 followers. It was the best thing because I had been waiting for this moment my whole life – so I then had to tell my boss I had to quit so I could work on my craft.

Joel:  How did you videos go viral?

It was probably a week after I posted that first video where It blew up. From there other facebook groups would share it and I think it was a massive facebook page “9GAG” who then posted it. I think they had 50 million followers and most of my followers came from there. Then more pages would share it and it got bigger from there.

Joel:  What was the most viewed video?

I think the most was on one page which got 130 million views.
It’s crazy! One of my videos video got me 200,000 follower in one day!

What is the secret to get your video viral?

I would say never give up… but then I kinda gave up and then it happened. (Haha) So maybe sometimes give up! Haha probably doesn’t happen all the time – I think I was just lucky.

Have a listen and find out more about this amazing young Tasmanian and be sure to checkout his Youtube Channel below too!!