Viral Video's

               I wanted to first start off with a definition of what a viral video is. According to SocialTimes YouTube’s weblebrity Kevin Nalty states “once a video hits 5 million views in a 3-7 day period it is considered a “viral” video”. A few years ago a million views was considered “viral”. It is crazy to see the difference in just a few years. A million views is a lot and they probably never thought of hitting a million. Back then they probably thought it would take forever to hit 5 million views; especially in the first week of being launched on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  

                A question many of us have and especially myself is how can we get a video to go viral? I’ve always wanted to get one of my videos to go viral, but I’ve always thought that I’m not creative enough. In a Ted talk Kevin Allocca talks about how to get a video to go viral. 

             He talks about how there are 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute! How do you expect to have a viral video with that much competition? Many people don’t have the intention of going viral, but it just happens. In this video Kevin mentions 3 things you need to have a viral video: Tastemakers, communities of participation, and unexpectedness.  I did not expect him to say those things. I was hoping that he would give a more specific answer or formula so I could follow it and have a viral video by next Wednesday. Unfortunately that was not the case.

                Tastemakers are people who get the video popular or out to the public. The example Kevin gives in his TED talk is Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy made a tweet about it, and then out of nowhere the video gets a few million views. So the tastemaker gives their opinion about something in this case the video and all of their followers want to see if it is legit or not. The tastemaker is what gets the video popular because it is usually a voice or a person that is popular nationwide/worldwide.

                The second point he talks about is participation. In this section Kevin talks about how you can take a random video and remake it using something that is meaningful to you or a lot of other people. The example given is of the Nyan cat and there are so many remakes with music, backgrounds, sounds, colors, etc. The important thing is the creativity of other people. Where we don’t just enjoy the video we actually participate in the video.

                The last thing is unexpectedness. If you catch the audience off guard, with either humor, something completely random that people wouldn’t expect, pretty much anything that you normally wouldn’t expect to happen is a great thing to provide. That is where the creativity comes into play. Like Kevin mentioned in the video, people who get videos to go viral most likely didn’t plan on their video going viral. It just happened. The tastemakers got a hold of the video, the participation from others increased the video views/ideas, and they were not a video you would expect to go viral. It just comes down to the audience. The audience is what makes your video go viral. You can only provide a video and then it’s out of your control.

                Hopefully these tips have been helpful and good luck making a video go viral!