Creators of Northern Tails, a Yukon-produced puppet program, have published some interesting insights into the audience well outside the Yukon it has been finding since it was made available on Youtube.
Northern Tails is pitched as a mockumentary “edutainment” web series in the announcement about its upload to the popular video-sharing service. Each of its 12-minute episodes looks into boreal forest animals’ interactions with their environment and the wider world. Narratives about the northern environment are driven forward by a crew of expertly-puppeteered ground squirrel filmmakers collecting and sharing information about the world around them. A variety of other Yukon critters make guest appearances in puppet form over the course of the series.
“We are super proud of this independent, all-Yukon production,” wrote series producer Kelly Milner in a March 4 email to the News.
Milner describes the show as both smart and silly and says one of its goals is to inspire viewers to be better neighbours.
“Our Yukon crew built a kooky puppet world from scratch and filmed the whole show in a makeshift studio in the old Whitehorse swimming pool. Now that we’ve released it into the wild, we love that it is finding audiences around the world,” Milner wrote.
Regarding those audiences, Northern Tails producers saw 61,000 views on the series trailer, 6,900 subscribers to its Youtube channel and a total of 130,000 views. These numbers were collected between Dec. 20 and Feb. 12. Northern Tails videos received roughly 227,000 views across all platforms in the time creators studied.
About 60 per cent of the show’s audience is in the United States with another 12 per cent in Canada and seven per cent in the United Kingdom. Beyond the English-speaking countries that make up the majority of the audience, Milner said a notable number of views and comments have been received from Argentina and Brazil.
“In fact, a Brazilian ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher has been using our episodes to teach English online. So I guess you never know who is going to like your content until you try,” Milner told the News.
Contact Jim Elliot at jim.elliot@yukon-news.com
