It’s a new year and new decade. What better way to start things off than with a blog about Kittens? Okay, so not literally about kittens, but about internet memes and viral videos. One example is the “Kittens Inspired by Kittens” video that has almost 7 million views on YouTube. I’m sure a good 100 of those views are from my friends asking me on a monthly basis to pull this video up on my iPhone. But, what makes a viral video successful?
I’ll preface this with a declaration that I am in no way a psychology expert nor have I studied extensively into memes. But, having spent more than a decade supporting internet technologies, I have been exposed to countless internet memes and viral videos. Therefore, my opinion on this matter is based on my experience alone.
The first ingredient in a successful viral video is brevity. Brevity is, as they say, the soul of wit. Ergo, brevity and wit go a long way in making a video successful, but wit need not apply. Some videos are just short captures of something that really happened. The event may not even be all that funny, if not gruesome or sad. I posit that the human attention span is relatively short and it takes a lot of work to hold it for longer than a few minutes, like movies. So a short video has a great shot at becoming viral.
Another ingredient is that it has to affect the audience. The best affect the video could have on a person to make the video viral is humor. Most people enjoy a good laugh. But serious videos can become viral if they evoke a great enough emotional response. One example of a negative emotional response is the one elicited from the video of Nick Berg being beheaded by Iraqi militants. There is another great example which involves a video named after a certain number of females and a certain number of cups. Either way, whether the video is funny or disgusting, I believe people feel the need to pass them on to share the experience.
The final ingredient is believability. This works two ways. If a video is believable, people are less likely to dismiss it as being manufactured just to be viral. People seem to have a sense for when they are being duped and they generally don’t like it. However, if the believability is questionable but not outright dismissible, the video can also become viral. This happens because people want to confirm with others that their suspicion is correct and will pass the video on to others to get that confirmation. Videos that completely dispense from reality seem to conform to this as well. This includes animated videos. Like any fiction, reality can be dispensed with when the fictional universe is consistent and interesting. Slip up, and your fictional reality becomes unbelievable. Make a minor mistake or be immaculate and the fiction can become viral.
So many great viral videos have come about in the past decade as access to high bandwidth internet has increased and more users begin to adopt social networking sites. However, not all viral videos are instant successes. Some take a while to be noticed. But if a video is brief, affects the audience, and is believable it has the right ingredients to become viral. All it needs is someone to find it and pass it on.
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Tags: kittens inspired by kittens, nick berg, social networking, viral video, youtube
