Trick Shot Videos

Submission 10,166

About

Trick Shot Videos are a popular genre of viral videos in which the participant successfully performs a highly improbable or challenging task that requires a great deal of athletic finesse or luck. Trick shots are practiced in a wide range of conventional sports, including pool, frisbee and basketball, as well as lesser-known games based on physical activities.

Origin

Trick shots predate the Internet by several decades; some of the earliest known practices of trick shots are attributed to artistic pool,^[1] a type of Billiards competition in which pool players perform trick shots to be judged both on creativity and skill, and the Harlem Globetrotters, a non-competitive basketball team known for its creative trick shots and entertaining play-throughs.^[2] Online, the earliest known viral trick shot video was an artistic pool video uploaded on October 20th, 2006 by YouTuber WHOOMP.TV, which received over 11 million views as of August 2015. ^[3]

Spread

There are over 530,000 results for trick shot videos on YouTube, which continues to be the largest accumulation.^[4] However, trick shots are growing in popularity on Vine, where there are more than 35,000 results,^[5]^[6] and many of the top videos have millions of loops. In addition, there are more than 98,000 videos and photos on Instagram tagged with the hashtag "trickshots."^[7]

Several YouTube and Vine accounts are known for their elaborate trick shots. The most popular YouTube trick shot account is called "Dude Perfect," which was created on March 16th 2009 and has more than 6.5 million subscribers as of August 2015.^[8] The account has posted 149 videos in five years, more than two thirds of which have more than 1 million views.

On Vine, one of the most prominent trick shot video accounts belongs to a Frisbee trick shot creator named Brodie Smith. Smith has over 1.7 million followers and over 469 million loops from his videos.^[9]