The story of Danny MacAskill

Today I was browsing through the ViralVideoCharts and found the latest video of the trial rider Danny MacAskill which I watched one year ago. This made me curious and so I tried to find out some more information about the story how he became famous.

According to different blogs (e.g. [1], [2]) Danny MacAskill posted 2009 a video called "Inspired Bicycles - Danny MacAskill April 2009" which has been viewed 27.929.436 times until now. He recorded this video with a flatmate and it attracted the attention of one of the most famous extreme mountainbikers of the world - Hans Rey from Switzerland. He tweeted the video which created a storm of retweets and a high number of views of the YouTube video as mentioned before. Later on another really famous cyclist, Lance Armstrong, also tweeted about Danny MacAskill which made the video even more famous.

Like Paul Andrews [2] stated, the posting of the video itself on YouTube alone wouldn’t have made him famous, it was the tweet from one well known biker which lead to the unbelievable spread of Danny MacAskill video.

Nowadays MacAskill earns his money by producing videos and trial biking for the well known brand Red Bull. In my opinion the story of this trial biker points out the power of Social Media - by attracting the attention of millions of people around the world it provides the possibility to change lives.

And here is the latest video “Danny MacAskill - Way Back Home" from 2010 viewed 14.911.919 times which I mentioned in the beginning. Enjoy it.

[1] Peter Walker, How Danny MacAskill's bike tricks have become a YouTube hit (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/bike-blog/2011/feb/20/danny-macaskill-bike-tricks)
[2] Paul Andrews, How Danny MacAskill got famous (http://bikeintelligencer.com/2009/12/how-danny-macaskill-got-famous/)
[3] My YouTube Story: Danny MacAskill (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trdTU0xc3Eg)