The wave of UGC, user-generated content, has grown from surprise viral videos hitting your inbox to a non-exclusive digital commodity of our social media landscape. Brands and creators frequently build with these novel moments in mind, instead of producing their own. It’s hard to make lightning strike the same place twice, so why even try when there’s a version of it already available to affordably download and immediately use in your project?

Many of these most engaging clips are of moments when things didn’t go according to plan, creating a whole new category of “fail videos” with increasing popularity as internet culture evolved, with numerous websites and social media accounts dedicated to sharing such content. I wrote a bit about this in 2021 when I started working at Jukin Media, a company which grew into a leading player in the UGC arena, which was shortly thereafter acquired by TMB, Trusted Media Brands, the parent company of Readers Digest, Taste of Home, Family Handyman, and other leading magazines.

Since then, my role hasn’t fundamentally changed. I’m producing on FailArmy, one of the biggest UGC blooper brands online, but now am working with a tremendous team that helps sift and sort through a seemingly endless amount of clips each day, developing them into funny new formats and series. This couldn’t be further from big-screen production work, but the old Hollywood adage “give me the same thing, only different” has never rung as true for any work so far in my career. Our specialty projects are bigger and more challenging each year, so we’re kicking off 2024 with something special, a compilation chronicling content throughout the decade of the brand’s existence:

Our Favorite Fails of the Last 10 Years

What constitutes ‘favorite’ though? Instead of trying to force rank tens of thousands of clips, especially since many of the brand’s early years’ staff aren’t still working here, we instead looked to internal publishing data for a sense of which clips our collective past producers used the most. Having spent the last three years in the front seat of this wild roller-coaster, helping lay the tracks as it barreled forward, I’ve seen a gobsmacking amount of bellyflops, faceplants, fender-benders, animals wreaking havoc, and schadenfreude coming in more categories than any other acquisitions team in the digital space could possibly be uncovering. Having thought I’d seen everything our archives had to offer, it was a fun surprise to realize just how much more we had in store.

The most rewarding part about this one, though, wasn’t just getting to the finish line, but working with a now much larger team than when I started, who helped sort through the cream of our crop, top clips, and produce this through to completion. Hiring and training an additional small but mighty video staff has been the most rewarding aspect of the role. Doing this in a remote work culture has been challenging in ways I hadn’t expected, but equally inspiring to see how people shine in similarly surprising ways. There’s a lot lost by not sitting next to someone you work with on the daily, but in the long run, I can’t see good habits and better trends not forming around the structure and privacy that this style provides. Heading into the new year, I feel more excitement than ever to see what we’ll do next.

I’ve seen plenty of these clips so many times already, still none probably as much as I’ve seen Fellowship of the Ring, but with ten-second runtimes instead of three and a half hours, I’m sure one will soon surpass it. My favorite fail though, one fail to rule them all, is without a doubt the Peanut Butter Baby – you’ll see it somewhere in the 2014 section of the Decade video linked above. It’s the most intimately absurd moment imaginable, a mom coming home to find that her 2-year-old has completely covered her baby brother in peanut butter. The baby is loving it and babbles triumphantly about their achievement. As I sit here reflecting on how many clips it took to make this hour-long extravaganza, I kind of feel like him myself.