So two things got me thinking about viral videos this past week. One was a friend’s post about viral video at the IMA’s Blog (link), and the other was a list of all YouTube videos with over 100 million views (link).
After absorbing all that I think the whole notion of a video being viral is dying for two reasons: the massive penetration of the internet and the creators of the content.
The Content
Viral content online was made into a buzz-worthy phenomena mostly because of the novelty of the distribution. Take for example the types of viral videos that were most popular in the early days of YouTube (the most responsible site for the distribution of viral content) – it was mostly random acts of ludicrous items which was partially a product of, or responsible for, the MTV Jackass type of content. While this type of content can still achieve lots of views, the most viewed content BY FAR is produced content…
Just look at the list of the videos over 100 million views. The vast majority of the list is highly produced video content. While a few are considered “user generated”, most of those are professional entertainers. Only one is probably an unscripted moment caught on video.
Internet Proliferation
Where previously viral referred to a video with an exponential rise in views in a short video of time, I think it’s almost evolved into being thought of as something more to do with how much of the internet-going population is exposed to the content in terms of hits or metrics. So while it may be more common for a video to get a million views, the vast increase of users in general trolling the internet content every minute has diminished the value of a million views.
Then there’s metrics, of which we have both too much and not enough depending on your outlook. Want a weird case study about this? Take the Rick Rolling phenomenon. Because of the multiple locations of that single piece of content spread across the entire internet, it is not accurately represented in total hits. But that’s also misrepresented because the vast majority of those people who got Rick Rolled navigated away after a very short time. Especially if they got hit multiple times.
Quantity vs. Quality
The problem with this fixation on hits is the whole notion of quantity vs. quality in terms content penetration. Some create content just for the sake of hits, but it’s completely different for those creating content for the sake of driving revenue, commerce, or true interest for any reason… In that instance, the focus should obviously be on quality of content. If you make content for a business that gets 10,000 hits with little to no content retention, it will be of very little benefit to the business. In most cases, it’d be better to create content that generated a few hundred hits with a higher rate of retention – it will have a much higher return of investment.