Why videos go viral Kevin Allocca
[Music]
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
[Music]
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
[Music]
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
[Music]
[Music]
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
[Music]
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]