Viral videos are videos that become popular most often through a viral process of Internet sharing, primarily through video sharing websites such as YouTube as well as social media and email."". PC Mag Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21 December 2012. Updated link: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/viral-video Lu Jiang, Yajie Miao, Yi Yang, ZhenZhong Lan, Alexander Hauptmann. Viral Video Style: A Closer Look at Viral Videos on YouTube. Retrieved 30 March 2016. Paper: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lujiang/camera_ready_papers/ICMR2014-Viral.pdf Slides: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lujiang/resources/ViralVideos.pdf For a video to be shareable or spreadable, it must focus on the social logics and cultural practices that have enabled and popularized these new platforms.
Viral videos may be serious, and some are deeply emotional, but many more are based more on entertainment and comedy. Notable early examples include televised comedy sketches, such as The Lonely Islands "Lazy Sunday" and "Dick in a Box", Numa Numa"How YouTube made superstars out of everyday people ". 11 April 2010. The Guardian."Guardian Viral Video Chart ". 8 June 2007. The Guardian. videos, The Evolution of Dance, Chocolate RainMurphy, Meagan (22 September 2010). "'Numa Numa Guy' Fronting Band, Still Single ". FOX411. on YouTube; and web-only productions such as I Got a Crush... on Obama.Tapper, Jake (13 June 2007). "Music Video Has a 'Crush on Obama' ". ABC News. Retrieved 27 December 2014. and some events that have been captured by eyewitnesses can get viral such as Battle at Kruger.BBC News states "Almost 9.5m people have already watched the video, dubbed the Battle at Kruger, which was filmed by US tourist Dave Budzinski while he was on a guided safari." Published 9 Aug 2007. Retrieved 26 March 2016 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6938516.stm
One commentator called the Kony 2012 video the most viral video in history (about 34 million views in 5.7 hours)* and 100 million views in six days), but "Gangnam Style" (2012) received one billion views in five months and was the most viewed video on YouTube from 2012 until "Despacito" (2017).
History Videos were shared long before YouTube or even the Internet by word-of-mouth, film festivals, VHS tapes, and even to fill time gaps during the early days of cable.Floorwalker, Mike (26 February 2013). "10 Videos That Went Viral Before The Internet ". ListVerse. Retrieved 28 December 2015. Perhaps the earliest was Reefer Madness, a 1936 "educational" film that circulated under several different titles. It was rediscovered by Keith Stroup, founder of NORML, who circulated prints of the film around college film festivals in the 1970s. The company who produced the prints, New Line Cinema, was so successful they began producing their own films. The most controversial was perhaps a clip from a newscast from Portland, Oregon in November 1970. In the clip, the disposal of a beached whale carcass by dynamite is documented, including the horrific aftermath of falling mist and chunks since the exclusion zone was not big enough."Long before the viral video or 'breaking the internet', there was the exploding whale ". 13 November 2015. 9News.com.au. Retrieved 28 December 2015. The exploding whale story obtained urban legend status in the Northwest and gained new interest in 1990 after Dave Barry wrote a humorous column about the event, leading to copies being distributed over bulletin board systems around 1994.
The "humorous home video" genre dates back at least to 1963, when the TV series "Your Funny, Funny Films" debuted. The series showcased amusing film clips, mostly shot on 8mm equipment by amateurs. The idea was revived in 1989 with America's Funniest Home Videos, a series described by an ABC executive as a one-time "reality-based filler special" that was inspired by a segment of a Japanese variety show, Fun With Ken and Kaito Chan, which borrowed clips from various Japanese home video shows as well.Wiener-Bronner, Danielle (21 October 2015) "The internet was supposed to kill 'America's Funniest Home Videos.' Instead, it's reviving it ." Fusion. Retrieved 28 December 2015. Now the longest-running primetime entertainment show in the history of ABC, the show's format includes showing clips of home videos sent in to the show's committee, and then the clips are voted on by a live filmed audience, with the winners awarded a monetary prize.Lindenbaum, Sybil (25 November 2015). "America's Funniest Home Videos Content Conquers Social Media With a Landmark 10 Million Subscribers ". PR Newswire. Retrieved 28 December 2015.
During the internet's public infancy, the 1996 Seinfeld episode "The Little Kicks" addresses the distribution of a viral video through non-online, non-broadcast means. It concludes with the citizens of New York City having individually witnessed Elaine's terrible dancing via a bootleg copy of a feature film, establishing that the dancing footage had effectively gone viral.
Viral videos began circulating as animated GIFs small enough to be uploaded to websites over dial-up Internet access or through email as attachments in the early 1990s.Brown, Damon (13 September 2010). "Celebrating the Web's earliest viral hits ". CNN. Retrieved 28 December 2015. Videos were also spread on message boards, P2P file sharing sites, and even coverage from mainstream news networks on television.Merrill, Brad (17 June 2015). "Here's How Videos Went Viral Before YouTube And Social Media ". Make Use Of. Retrieved 28 December 2015. Two of the most successful viral videos of the early internet era were "The Spirit of Christmas" and "Dancing Baby". "The Spirit of Christmas" surfaced in 1995, spread through bootleg copies on VHS and on the internet, as well as an AVI file on the PlayStation game disc for Tiger Woods 99, later leading to a recall."Tiger Woods Game Pulled ." 15 January 1999. IGN. Retrieved 28 December 2015. The popularity of the videos led to the creation of the television series South Park after it was picked up by Comedy Central. "Dancing Baby", a 3D-rendered dancing baby video made in 1996 by the creators of Character Studio for 3D Studio MAX, became something of a mid-late 1990s cultural icon in part due to its exposure on worldwide commercials, editorials about Character Studio, and the popular television series Ally McBeal.Lefevre, Greg (19 January 1998) "Dancing Baby cha-chas from the Internet to the networks" . CNN. The video may have first spread when Ron Lussier, the animator who cleaned up the raw animation, began passing the video around his workplace, LucasArts.
Later distribution of viral videos on the internet before YouTube, which was created in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006, were mostly through websites dedicated to hosting humorous content, such as Newgrounds and YTMND, although message boards such as eBaum's World and Something Awful were also instrumental. Notably, some content creators hosted their content on their own websites, such as Joel Veitch's site for his band Rather Good, which hosted quirky Flash videos for the band's songs; the most popular was "We Like the Moon", whose viral popularity on the internet prompted Quiznos to parody the song for a commercial.Fine, Jon (16 February 2004). "Pop culture: Veitch's critters hit big in Quiznos spots ". Advertising Age. Retrieved 28 December 2015. The most famous self-hosted home of viral videos is perhaps Homestar Runner, released in the early 2000's and is still running today In the mid 2000's more social media websites such as Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2006) gave users the option to share videos causing them to go viral. More recently, there has been a surge in viral videos on video sharing sites such as YouTube, partially because of the availability of affordable digital cameras. Beginning in December 2015, YouTube introduced a "trending" tab to alert users to viral videos using an algorithm based on comments, views, "external references", and even location. The feature reportedly does not use viewing history to serve up related content, and the content may be curated by YouTube.Cox, Jamieson (9 December 2015). "YouTube is making it easier to find viral videos ". The Verge. Retrieved 27 December 2015.
Modern viral videos tend to come from TikTok (rebrand of Musical.ly since 2018) and Instagram (2012), TikTok hosts short form content in a portrait format, these short videos are often meant to be humorous, while others focus mainly on music, viral videos commonly came from music related short videos and popular dances, TikTok was a large internet sensation causing many viral videos to be made.
Qualification There are several ways to gauge whether a video has "gone viral". The statistic perhaps most mentioned is number of views, and as sharing has become easier, the threshold requirement of sheer number of views has increased. YouTube personality Kevin Nalty (known as Nalts) recalls on his blog: "A few years ago, a video could be considered 'viral' if it hit a million views", but says as of 2011, only "if it gets more than 5 million views in a 3–7-day period" can it be considered "viral".O'Neill, Megan (9 May 2011). "What Makes A Video 'Viral'? " AdWeek. Retrieved 20 December 2013.Nalts (pseudonym) (6 May 2011). "How many views do you need to be viral? " Will Video for Food (blog). Retrieved 28 December 2015. To compare, 2004's Numa Numa received two million hits on Newgrounds in its first three months (a figure explained in a 2015 article as "a staggering number for the time").
Nalts also posits three other considerations: buzz, parody, and longevity, which are more complex ways of judging a viral video's views. Buzz addresses the heart of the issue; the more a video is shared, the more discussion the video creates both online and offline. What he emphasizes is notable is that the more buzz a video gets, the more views it gets. A study on viral videos by Carnegie Mellon University found that the popularity of the uploader affected whether a video would become viral, and having the video shared by a popular source such as a celebrity or a news channel also increases buzz. It is also part of the algorithm YouTube uses to predict popular videos.Southern, Matt (10 December 2015). "YouTube Introduces a 'Trending' Tab, Surfacing Viral Videos in Real Time ". Search Engine Journal. Retrieved 27 December 2015. Parodies, spoofs and spin-offs often indicate a popular video, with long-popular video view counts given with original video view counts as well as additional view counts given for the parodies. Longevity indicates if a video has remained part of the Zeitgeist.
Reasons for popularity Due to their societal impact and marketability, viral videos attract attention in both advertising and academia. Several theories attempt to determine why viral videos are spread and what makes a video go viral.
The social learning theory was introduced by Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura in 1977. He proposed that people learn by observing others, particularly those perceived as being influential or like themselves, and then imitate the observed behaviors, especially when those behaviors lead to rewards such as attention or approval. This process is known as vicarious reinforcement, where people model their behavior based on the observed success or failure of others. In the case of viral videos, when someone sees a dance, challenge, or trend gaining millions of views or likes, they may be motivated to replicate it in hopes of achieving similar social recognition.