Chile’s YouTube Viral Sensation: Woki Toki · Global Voices
Laura Vidal

76 Screen capture from Woki Toki. YouTube.
Woki Toki, a popular YouTube channel from Chile, is responsible for a slew of viral videos about local everyday, urban life. The channel's creative team, which now runs an independent production company online, began with low-budget projects, hoping to get the attention of clients with its videos.
In an interview with El Defenido, Woki Toki's creative director, Nikolas Rojas, shared stories about how the group got started and described the rocky evolution of ideas that today make them one of Chile's most-visited YouTube channels. The group spent its first six months promoting itself with very little money:
In that situation with my partner, it was like, you know what, instead of convincing people that we can do something different, let's just do it. Why are we going around with papers and a PowerPoint telling people this is how we'll do things, and that the brand will be really good. No, let's go and do it ourselves, let's be that brand. Instead of buying ourselves Chinese soup, let's spend that money on videos, be our own client, and maybe it'll work.
While its audiovisuals are produced with professional quality, the channel owes much of its popularity to videos that capture conversations and typical settings in contemporary Chile. For instance, Woki Toki runs a series collecting 42 catchphrases about a particular subject, such as jokes about families, sports, work life, and the eternal debates between the sexes. Other series, like “The World in 2 Minutes,” also distill popular culture, and often various stereotypes, into short, amusing videos. Unsurprisingly, the videos often lead to heated debates in the comments section on YouTube.
Woki Toki also conducts various social experiments, challenging people to explain or perform amusing tasks. (For example, several men in one video are asked to dress themselves in women's undergarments. In another video, various men and women are asked to explain the specific use of several sex toys.) The videos, as one might imagine, are extremely popular. In addition to YouTube, you can follow Woki Toki on Facebook and Twitter.