Monday, January 25, 2010

The B-Roll Teaches Us About Viral - Sounds gross!

I shall preface this by explaining that in video terminology (by today's standards) B-Roll refers to stock footage clips that you shoot or buy to fill space in a video that illustrates a concept, sets the mood or just generally breaks up the monotony of listening to someone gab on.
Well, one producer thought it was so funny how generic most stock footage is (and he's totally right) that he made THIS:


Okay, at current count, the number of views on this singular post are 390,193.
Underneath the video on this YouTube page you will find the Statistics that show exactly where the lion's share of these views are coming from.
On NOV 29th, the video was posted onto YouTube and since then, 67,650 people have either found it in search results, been forwarded the video in emails or like me, heard about it from a friend (in my case my business partner Paul Hudson - who saw it on DVXuser.com, a forum dedicated to video production), and one night I even saw it on the Comedy Central Tosh.0 Late Night cable program.
The next day was the first time someone referred to it to on Facebook. Since then, it has been viewed 15,266 times from Facebook. Not bad, but dwarfed by comparison to the first figure.
But three days later, someone actually copied the Embed Tag and embedded it into Facebook and since then it has drummed up 24,746 views. Apparently Facebookers are too lazy to click on links to content or they are drawn to clicking on something that they can see - hmmm. Lazy internet-browsers or visually-stimulated browsers? Maybe a hybrid of the two.
A few here and there websites like bestofyoutube.com, boingboing.com and even Twitter all yielded something, but the real impressive output was Reddit.com with a whopping 35,923 views.
What the heck is Reddit.com? It's a Social Network like Facebook or Myspace but instead of posting what you're doing while waiting at the clinic (or not doing, like thinking about some of your choices in life) you post a link to something on the internet and your fellow webnauts bump the links up or down in an Adam-Smith-inspired "invisible hand" of internet Democracy for what is the coolest content on the web.
What do we learn from this?

1) Know your audience
2) Catch their eye by embedding the video, not just linking to it
3) Encourage your viewers to embed it in Social Networks, particularly Reddit.com if it is funny or generally likely to withstand the harsh and critical sieve of Web-surfer democracy.

No comments:

Post a Comment