The Daily Background

When I’m not rubbing shoulders with internet campaign pioneer Joe Trippi (Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign manager), publishing allegations about Congressmen before the Washington Post reports on them, interviewing “wanted” Iranian parliament members, giving tech support to Oscar-nominated documentary filmmakers, single-handedly scaring Republican Senate campaigns into covering their cyber tracks, gushing about Barack Obama from a techie perspective on Slashdot.org, or otherwise treating this series of tubes like my own personal playground, I will occasionally try to influence debate about politics.

And one of the greatest ways to influence debate (or start a debate) these days is through viral video. Disagree? Just ask former Republican Senator George ‘macaca‘ Allen.

These days, viral video is a lot like the “pet rock” was in the 1970s: everybody knows it’s hot, but nobody quite understands it. In the case of viral video, everybody from the 13 year old with a cell phone camera to politicians will million-dollar budgets are trying to figure out how to harness its power.

My first accidental experiment with viral video was a YouTube clip I uploaded of Michael J Fox (who has Parkinson’s disease) discussing his support for stem cell research. That video was, without my knowledge, submitted to Digg, where it was dugg 1,753 times. The clip itself has now been seen by more than 90,000 people.

The biggest question that people seem to run into is, how can I make my video go viral? I sure hadn’t been trying with the Michael J. Fox clip– it just happened. Wikipedia describes a viral video this way:

“The term viral video refers to video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email or IM messages, blogs and other media sharing websites.”

How easy is it to orchestrate this type of thing? Can one intentionally set up a situation where a video goes “viral”? Or is it out of the content-creator’s hands?

A week ago, I set out on a mission. I was going to try my hardest to make a video “go viral.” The video I had in mind was political, it was a clip from the recently-released-on-DVD documentary “Giuliani Time” which I got from Netflix.

The clip was of a poor guy with Parkinson’s disease calling in to Mayor Giuliani’s weekly radio program a few years back and calling him a crook because his policies had kicked him off medicaid and food-stamps. Giuliani then told the guy he had a mental problem- hardly the Mayor’s most flattering moment.

Click here to see the original version of the video I uploaded to YouTube. You’ll notice it’s only been viewed a few thousand times.

After I started my attempts to make the video go viral, I realized that a similar version of the same clip had been uploaded to YouTube a day before I had uploaded it.

A week later, that version of the video has only been viewed 758 times.

By contrast, the version of the video I uploaded has now been viewed more then 27,000 times.

They were essentially the same clip How had I managed to make the video go viral, and why did the other version of the clip fall flat? My version of the clip eventually scored more than 100 reddits, almost 200 diggs, was mirrored and linked to from dozens of blogs and other websites, featured on iFilm, and even Microsoft’s official MSN Video service under their “What’s Hot” category.

In short, why had one version of the video succeeded in going viral, while the other didn’t?

That’s the question I set out to answer. And the answer, it seems to me, is two-fold. Firstly, promotion. Secondly, unintentional promotion and diversity.

Intentional Promotion
Contrary to what you might think, I didn’t do a tremendous amount of promotion for this video. There’s no amount of promotion you can do to make a something that sucks into something popular. Just ask the marketers of Paris Hilton’s album.

On the other hand, if the content you offer is great (content here meaning video), people will make it go viral by spreading it everywhere they can. That said, there were a few key things I did do, to help the video along on its path to viral-ness.

Firstly, I uploaded the video to YouTube. A simple enough start. My 200-something subscribers were given the opportunity to see it, but that wasn’t much. The next thing I did was to embed the video right here on my blog, letting the measly few hundred visitors I get each day see it, with the hope that some of them would distribute it on their own websites

It worked. I woke up the next morning to find that Shakespeare’s Sister, a Top-1,000 blogger had featured the video on her website, giving my YouTube version many a much bigger audience (and consequently more views) than it would have normally. It also provoked some healthy discussion: 20 comments on her site.

Shakespeare’s Sister’s post was in turn linked to by other websites, all more popular than mine. Some smaller MySpace users also embedded the video on their blogs. Later on, some weird website from the Netherlands also embedded my original YouTube version of the video on their site in a language I’m afraid I don’t understand. An unintended consequence, but apparently they got a kick out of it. Another 12 comments, more buzz.

I also submitted my YouTube video to a website called VideoSift, where it became featured front-page content, with another 11 comments.

A great start, but I wasn’t done yet.

One of the keys to making videos go viral is to put them in front of a bigger audience, who will then distribute it further on their own. This might seem simple, but it’s very important. In this case, in order to give the video a bigger audience, I sent in the original MPEG clip to Crooks & Liars, a liberal video blog with a huge audience (it’s the 21st most popular blog on the entire internet, according to Technorati).

The guy who runs Crooks & Liars posted the clip in several formats (.WMV and .MOV) for people to watch and download. Almost instantly 12,000 people had viewed the clip in the formats he provided. Plus, another 144 comments in his discussion thread: the buzz was building.

Even better: twenty blogs linked to the Crooks & Liars post including the video, driving more attention to the video. More than one hundred people boosted the Crooks & Liars post on Reddit. Another 34 comments in the Reddit thread. 17 people voted for the C&L post on Newsvine, and it got another 40 comments. People were really interested in discussing this clip.

Unintentional promotion and diversity

And that’s when things really started to take off. People started downloading the clip to their computer, and uploading it in all sorts of places. A bunch of people downloaded it and uploaded it to their own YouTube accounts so their subscribers could see it, totaling a few thousand more views and many more comments.

And as a result, more buzz was created, and people started embedding those videos in their own websites and blogs, without knowing where the video had originated from or even that their versions of the video were now a copy of a copy of a copy.

Next somebody uploaded the video, presumably downloaded from Crooks & Liars, to a popular video website called iFilm, where it was viewed almost 10,000 more times, got another 18 comments, and became featured content. Another 12 bloggers linked to the iFilm version, which is also embeddable, and got another 18 comments: more buzz. Somebody posted that on Digg, and it received 192 diggs and another 57 comments.

Somebody else uploaded the video to a site I’d never heard of, called Snunk, where it got more views (though how many I’m not sure since they don’t provide public stats). That version of the video made it to the front page of Shoutwire, a service similar to Digg.

By now, people had started talking about the clip in forums (see a funny and unexpected example of people discussing it on a forum normally dedicated to the computer game Battlefield 1942 here), and one person even wrote a letter to Salon.com about it.

Because iFilm had featured the content on their site, it was then syndicated on other, more popular websites they are partners with, such as Microsoft’s official MSN Video service, which relieves hundreds of hits every hour- probably thousands- and is the same place where you can watch official clips from MSNBC as well as music videos (unfortunately they don’t provide statistics for how many people have watched videos however).

I wouldn’t have been able to upload the video to this site even if I wanted to, because it doesn’t allow user-submitted content. Somebody ended up promoting the MSN Video version of the clip on a website called ClipBlast that I was also unaware of.

The bottom line
The bottom line is, you can’t make a video go viral by yourself. Viral video by definition means that you’re not the only person promoting it.

You can however give your videos a push- a head start, if you will. You can do a lot better than just uploading it to YouTube. Embed the video in your blog or MySpace account. Try sending it to popular niche sites whose audience is already interested in what you’ve got (like Crooks & Liars in this case), try sending it to other bloggers, try submitting it to sites like Digg, Reddit, Shoutwire, Newsvine, and VideoSift.

Things really start happening when your audience sees your video and want to share it with other people. That’s the key. And the more people you can show it to, on as wide a diversity of websites, communities, and people you can show it to, the greater the chance you’ll come across somebody who will want to promote it for you, and think of some way of sharing it that you hadn’t thought of before.

Got a tip that I haven’t mentioned? Leave it in the comments.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog