Anatomy of Viral Videos:
There are certainly levels of “viral” from something like Psy’s Gangnam Style which is just over two billion hits on youtube (and over 5 million comments)! To more down-to-earth videos that get some fast play through publicity, then fade into the past. To share a personal experience in that latter category, I had one of my video go viral. It was a short ride that lasted just a couple days, but what a crazy ride it was.
It all started last Thanksgiving when the family went ice skating on a lake in Montana. Unusual weather conditions made the ice crystal clear. I mean really clear. Like scarry clear. Disorientingly clear! Since I knew this experience would be hard to explain, and frankly, somewhat unbelievable, I shot some video with a little point and shoot camera, tossed it into iMovie, grabbed a song from my iTunes library, and launched it up to Youtube.
I shared out the link to the video to a few friends and family, and a week later, I had a whopping 25 hits. The video sat unwatched in Youtube’s endless servers until our local newspaper ran a story about the unique lake ice conditions in the region. I fired off a quick email to the news editor and newspaper webpage editor sharing the link to the video in case they were interested. They were, and they embedded the video into their homepage. The number of views skyrocketed to over 200 hits!
Then someone somewhere (New York City?) embedded the video into their blog. The number broke 600 views. Then someone put it on Reddit. The number broke a thousand. Then 10,000! Then the Huffington Post featured it along with Disclose.TV. Boom! 25,000 hits. Then MSN ran it. Then I got a call from CNN asking permission to use it, followed by a call from the Discovery Channel. Boom, Boom! 100,000+ hits!
Then CNN emailed me to do a quick skype interview about it to appear live on one of their TV news segments. Another instant 40,000 hits!
Then a few knockoff videos showed up using my images but their music. Most were from other countries. I guess a good indicator of your video making it big is when it it ripped off Youtube, remixed, and reposted using the same or similar name.
As I look at the video on YouTube now, there are just shy of 174k hits since initial posting it on November 30, 2013. While I found this whole experience interesting, I also know there are thousands of kids out there who can review a Nerf gun, or share their Star Wars Lego set and score half a million hits over time. Like ABCD123Toast’s contribution to the cinimatic world. Or CACox97’s nineth installment about Nerf Guns which might break 2 million hits this year. And that is just one of his 297 posted videos, in addition to his YouTube Channel. And assuming that this kid was born in 1997, he could still walk into your class as a student.
There are two major educational takeaways from this experience. First, always do your best work because you never know where it will go. I’m not sure I had even taken my coat off by the time I had the video edited and uploaded to youtube. I’d bet I only spent five minutes on the thing. I grabbed some of the small video files off the little Canon camera and tossed them into iMovie. Trimmed the clips to get rid of the bad stuff. Added a title screen. Faded in and out. Muted the audio. Tossed a song into the mix, and fired it up to youtube.
The second takeaway is that once you throw your work out into the wild, you loose control over it so just enjoy the ride. Most likely it will be a short one. In my case, once the dust settled on my CNN interview, the hit counter slowed to a crawl, and the ride was over.
