While everyone tries to get millennials to pay attention to live television, BuzzFeed was able to captivate more than 800,000 people at once thanks to some rubber bands and a piece of fruit.
On Friday, the media company used Facebook Live to livestream its employees putting rubber bands around a watermelon with the goal of making it explode, which it ultimately did with an Internet-satisfying burst.
There were more than 800,000 live viewers at the time of the explosion, and the video — a simple affair with a melon, a table and two people in lab coats — was watched more than 2.9 million times in total at the time of publication, according to Facebook.
It had more than 318,000 comments and more than 8,400 shares by the time BuzzFeed turned off the show.
“This far outperformed anything I’d previously thought possible,” Jeremy Briggs, head of Buzzfeed Video in New York, told CNBC. “It had a lot of elements I was eager to test, but nobody saw this level of popularity coming. It’s very exciting.”
The feed is now most-watched livestream, both concurrently and through replays, in Facebook history. The record was previously held by Vin Diesel.
Soon after, other media outlets attempted to replicate BuzzFeed’s success, including a Fortune editor who calculatingly stapled an orange.
Below is a collect of tweets from users losing their collective minds over the juicy video.
