A Ramble on Viral Video

When it comes to web promotion, people can’t go wrong when they make use of viral video. Viral video is just basically some amateur video, or a video made to look like an amateur video. The main purpose is for the video to catch attention. For commercially-driven viral video, for the video to attract enough attention as to get people to also try out the product featured, mentioned, or otherwise attached to the video.

Viral Video started a few years back, when YouTube started to gain popularity. As users uploaded entertaining videos and viewers started to intently watch these and become fans of the producers, Viral Video became a staple on the Internet.

The dominant genre for viral videos is comedy. While surely the shock videos also dominated the scene, more videos were aimed at tickling the funny bones of people. Other videos also displayed people doing unbelievable feats like this: Kobe Bryant leaping over a pool filled with poisonous snakes.



Others were parodies of internet phenomena, like the Alexey Vayner application video, that earned the outrage, as well as the mockery of a lot of people. The Vayner video had spawned such a phenomenon that hilarious viral video makers had parodied his video.


Online Videos by Veoh.com





Viral Video like the Cadbury gorilla commercial created a stir online and added Cadbury to the list of companies who used the Viral Video for marketing purposes.

On the other hand, there were Viral Video phenomena that barged in on the scene that were not positioned to become a moneymaking hit. The Numa Numa video, an innocuous dancing video by a young, geeky teen, made waves across the Internet and made him an overnight celebrity, as well as overnight millionaire. He has since built an enterprise around his dance video, though with lesser success than his original, uninentional hit of a first vid.

On the whole, Internet Phenomena has three factors to it:

  • Novelty
  • Enjoyability
  • Shock value.

While other video producers tend to go for shock value to gather attention, the basic way that a Viral Video gathers attention would be if it’s not something others have watched before. Usually people go for the “sex sells everything” ethic. While it’s very gross, and I believe that the use of sexuality in everything has degraded our tastes in entertainment, you can’t help but shake your head at how crazily effective sex is.

Goshly. I think I’ll stick to watching Mac vs. PC videos. Tech is my new porn. :p

Comments

Popular Posts