Why videos go viral Kevin Allocca

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hi I’m Kevin Alaka I’m the trends

manager at YouTube and I professionally

watch YouTube videos that’s true so

we’re going to talk a little bit today

about how videos go viral and then why

that even matters we all want to be

stars celebrities singers comedians and

when I was younger that seems so very

very hard to do but now web video has

made it so that any of us or any of the

creative things that we do can become

completely famous in a part of our

world’s culture and any one of you could

be famous on the internet by next

Saturday but there are over 48 hours of

video uploaded to YouTube every minute

and of that only a tiny percentage ever

goes viral and gets tons of views and

becomes a cultural moment so how does it

happen three things case makers

communities of participation and

unexpectedness alright let’s go

last year Baer Vasquez posted this video

that he had shot outside his home in

Yosemite National Park in 2010 it was

viewed 23 million times this is a chart

what it looked like when it first became

popular last summer but he didn’t

actually set out to make a viral video

bear he just wanted to share a rainbow

because that’s what you do when your

name is Yosemite mountain bear

and he had posted lots of nature videos

in fact in this video had actually been

posted all the way back in January so

what happened here Jimmy Kimmel actually

Jimmy Kimmel posted this tweet that

would eventually propel the video to be

as popular as it had become because

tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel introduced

us to new and interesting things and

bring them to a larger audience

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so you didn’t think that we could

actually have this conversation without

talking about this video I hope Rebecca

Black’s Friday is one of those popular

videos of the year it’s been seen nearly

200 million times this year this is a

chart what it looked like and similar to

double rainbow it seems to have just

sprouted up out of nowhere so what

happened on this day well it was a

Friday it’s true and if you’re wondering

about those other spikes those are also

Friday’s but but what about this day

this one particular Friday

well tosh point-o picked it up a lot of

blogs started writing about it Michael J

Nelson from Mystery Science Theater was

one of the first people to post a joke

about the video on Twitter but what’s

important is that an individual or a

group of tastemakers took a point of

view and they shared that with a larger

audience accelerating the process and so

then this community formed of people who

shared this big inside joke and they

started talking about it and doing

things with it and now there are 10,000

parodies of Friday on YouTube even in

the first seven days there was one

parody for every other day of the week

unlike the one way entertainment of the

20th century this community

participation is how we become a part of

the phenomenon either by spreading it or

doing something new with it

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so nyan cat is a looped animation with

loop music it’s this just like this it’s

been viewed nearly 50 million times this

year and if you think that that is weird

you should know that there is a

three-hour version of this that’s been

viewed 4 million times even cats were

watching this video

cats were watching other cats watch this

video alright but but what’s important

here what’s important here is the

creativity that it inspired amongst this

this techie geeky internet culture there

were remixes someone made an old-timey

version

and then it went international

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an entire remix community sprouted up

that brought it from being just a stupid

joke to something that we could all

actually be a part of because we don’t

just enjoy now we participate and who

could have predicted any of this who

could a predicted double rainbow or

Rebecca Black or nyan cat what scripts

could you have written that would have

contained this in it in a world where

over two days of video get uploaded

every minute only that which is truly

unique and unexpected can stand out in

the way that these things have when a

friend of mine told me that I needed to

see this this great video about a guy

protesting bicycle fines in New York

City

I admit I wasn’t very interested in a

bike lane but often there are

obstructions that keep you from

probably riding in the bike

yeah by being totally surprising and

humorous Casey nice tat got his funny

idea and point seen five million times

and so this approach holds for anything

new that we do creatively and so it all

brings us to one big question

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what does it mean tastemakers creative

participating communities complete

unexpectedness these are characteristics

of a new kind of media in a new kind of

culture where anyone has access and the

audience defines the popularity I mean

as mentioned earlier one of the biggest

stars in the world right now Justin

Bieber got his start on YouTube

no one has to green-light your idea and

we all now feel some ownership in our

own pop culture and these are not

characteristics of old media and they’re

barely true of the media of today but

they will define the entertainment of

the future thank you

[Applause]