Viral Video Examples from YouTube
for the Top Ten Tips

These are not necessarily the best or most popular examples of the Top Ten Tips, but they do a good job of illustrating the points.

10. Short: No specific example. As far as I can tell, all of the most popular ones are short. Some are really short (15 seconds).

9. Good enough technically: Any of them.

8. Sincere (even if fake): LonelyGirl15. She’s not lonely, not 15, and not even a girl (I mean, she’s old enough to be a woman). But she sounds sincere. She started out seeming real, then she was exposed as a fake, but she’s still very popular. It’s just that it’s a fiction series instead of a factual one. Here’s an early example with more than a million YouTube hits.

7. Lame: Candy Mountain. Kind of ugly, very crudely done, overall pretty stupid. Around 2 million YouTube hits. Go figure.

6. Candid Camera: Nalts. Kevin Nalts does a good job with these types of videos. Here’s an example of one of them.

5. Parody: White and Nerdy. By the master of parody, Weird Al Yankovich. This parody video is more popular than the one that it copies (Ridin’ Dirty). Over 10 million hits for this YouTube version.

4. Explosions: The Exploding Whale. The one below is one of many versions of the same film that is copied all over the place. MSNBC estimates the video of the broadcast has been viewed over 350 million times.

3. Music + foreign accent: Numa Numa. 700 million views (Source: MSNBC)

2. Looking foolish: Star Wars Kid (and Numa Numa again). MSNBC says 900 million views for the SWK. It goes to show that high production quality is not a prerequisite for wild popularity.

1. Originality: Just about all of the examples above became so popular because they were original in some way - being the first, or the best, or the most inventive or memorable or something.

Can you do as well as they did? Maybe not "Star Wars Kid" level, but you can make a start. The more you try, the better you'll get.

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