YouTube's most enduring star, Matt Harding, has turned a goofy dance he devised in a Brisbane office block into a global marketing colossus, which now includes the lucrative speaker circuit and a book deal.
Like reality TV winners, most YouTube stars are back to their day jobs within months but Harding has kept his jig going for four years since he appeared in his first web video.
During that time he has been paid to travel to the four corners of the globe three times, simply to be filmed dancing badly at various locations and in front of some of the world's most famous landmarks.
Now Harding, 31, is the face of a new global marketing campaign by Visa, which has been running since late last month on television in eight countries, including Australia.
In an email interview, Harding said he had also been hired to appear in several travel agency advertisements and by Google to create a new layer for Google Earth, showing off his favourite dancing locations.
He has also appeared on hundreds of talk shows around the world - including The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, the Jimmy Kimmel show and The Tyra Banks Show - and is frequently paid to speak at events and conferences.
"Speaking has become an unanticipated side occupation that I very much enjoy. I'm not very good at it, but I'm learning a lot," Harding wrote in his online journal after returning from a speaking engagement at a gathering of animal-feed salespeople in Minneapolis.
By May, Harding said he would have his first book in stores and he has not ruled out travelling the world again to make new clips.
He said the book would be a collection of anecdotes about making his videos.
Asked how long he expected to be able to milk his internet celebrity for cash, he said he had no idea.
"I don't pursue projects like this. I just make the videos and sometimes other cool opportunities come along," Harding, who keeps his earnings close to his chest, said.
For the Visa project, the financial terms of which have not been disclosed, Harding travelled to China, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam for two weeks with his girlfriend, keeping a diary on his blog.
"It was sort of like a paid vacation," he said.
But that's nothing compared with the travelling the pair did for Harding's latest YouTube video, which went up five months ago and has already garnered 13 million hits.
For the 4½-minute clip, Harding spent 14 months travelling to 42 countries. He did his geeky jive with Bollywood dancers in Gurgaon, India, with humpback whales in Tonga, with lemurs in Madagascar and even in zero gravity in Nellis Airspace, Nevada.
That trip began just months after Harding returned from a world tour of 39 countries for his second internet video, which was published on YouTube in June 2006 and has notched up 12 million views.
Unlike most viral web hits, Harding's popularity has increased with time. The 2006 video took a little over two years to reach 10 million hits but the latest one passed that mark in 83 days. Both were sponsored by Stride gum.
After high school, Harding, following his dad's advice, decided to skip university and become a video game developer. His career took him to Brisbane's Pandemic Studios in 2000 for 2½ years. I was there that he devised his now famous jig.
His first video, filmed while travelling with a co-worker and published on his website in January 2005 before the days of YouTube, was made simply as a running gag for family and friends but quickly spread virally across the web. It was viewed about 2 million times.
When the live-action "
You control it from an inconspicuous distance with the palm-size remote control "egg". It's so realistic – people won't be able to tell the difference until you're up very close (which most people won't want to be). Those furry legs crawl in a disturbingly spider-esque fashion – creeping, stalking and scurrying across any smooth flat surface. And if that isn't unsettling enough, just wait until it's eyes glow red!
