Thoughts on viral videos

Photo: changturtle

Viral videos are in the news recently and apparently they generate lots of inbound links. I’ve heard many stupid things about viral videos up to now, but the one that makes the top of the list is that “content is NOT king” (and it’s laughable because it has been said by an “expert“). First off let me give my personal explanation of what “viral” means: it’s something that spreads without control. And you know why it happens? Because its content is awesome and just makes it look brilliant.

I personally don’t care whether a viral video is created to advertise a product or not: as long as the content is interesting I will watch it and pass it on to my friends. Here is an example: the other day I was logged into Seesmic and I was watching some videos posted by mollyberry, a very funny girl. This video in particular made me think that she might be there as an early adopter of Seesmic to endorse her employer JetBlue, especially after I read this post on her blog (6th paragraph). Nonetheless, I’d keep on watching her videos because I like them.

But, hey, that was just my impression and I might be totally wrong; it’s just that I like to observe details and I’m a woman, so I tend to be hypercritical. However this fact made me realize that the more viral videos look amateurish the better chances they have to succeed. Mainstream media always showed us that amateur videos were crappy and poor in quality and if you wanted to produce video ads you had to provide high definition images and special effects. Internet, instead, taught us that amateur videos are great for communicating certain messages.

It’s easy to pay people to do and spread videos but it’s very hard to create something that can really blow their mind.