If anyone has been spending too much time on the interweb , or follows news from ‘across the pond’, they would’ve come across this at some point:
The video is actually three years old, but I’d never come across it before: an American friend showed it to me.
Anyway, the point is that this innocuous-looking (not the crime itself) local news item – by virtue of Antoine Dodson’s interesting interview style – went viral.
The original video has 55 million views, and the spin-off auto-tuned song has 118 million views.
Below are some other videos that went viral, three of which I still cannot understand how this happened to them:
Effectively there is absolutely no rhyme nor reason behind one video going viral over another. The videos can be about virtually nothing (a baby biting a toddler’s finger…), but enough people decide to pass it on/view it, and it becomes a ‘sensation’.
With this is mind, it is nigh on impossible to set out to make a commercial viral. You might want to make a viral video, but you don’t get to make the decision as to whether it goes viral or not; other people do.
All you can do is try to make something funny/interesting/poignant, without really making it seem like an ad, and hope for the best.
With that in mind, it’s a good idea to round off with some smart virals that actually set out to be virals: