3 Million Views in 6 Months

About 5 months ago, I was on the web trying to figure out what makes videos go viral and I saw a one-month old video link on my YouTube Homepage that was a cute gal singing an alternate version of Beyonce's famous "Single Ladies".

I'm not a fan of the song, myself, but I thought that the artist called Pomplamoose (I assume is both this young lady and her boyfriend? brother? friend?) did a really good job of not only remixing the song creatively but showing it off with some good Post-Production work (editing).

Since video production (especially post-production) is what I do, I re-watched the video again and again appreciating the star quality that it added to the video to see everything from an upright piano to polaroid camera contributing to the production of the track.

I went and found the song again by just searching "cover song" and wouldn't you know it? She has gone from just shy of half-a-million views to over 3 million!

There are Super Bowl Ads that haven't received a fraction of the traffic that this video has.

Now, looking at the video's statistics, the past six months were all kicked off within 24 hours! a Blitzkrieg of YouTube views, if you will.

Observe:

September 17th, 2009 (DAY 1)

Pomplamoose uploads this video and puts it on their Facebook page. Ultimately this will result in over 200,000 views over six months - not bad.

September 18th, 2009 (DAY 2)

Somebody looks up "single ladies beyonce" or "single ladies" and so do thousands of other people and see this video that's been running around on Facebook for about 24 hours. These links will eventually result in over 230,000 views.

Apparently the video has reached enough coverage at this point that people started talking to their friends about it and they begin looking it up on their smart-phones. This will eventually stack up to almost half-a-million views, by itself.

Apparently by this time, the video was tagged by the staff at YouTube as a hot video and so YouTube posted the video on the YouTube Homepage - eventually this will contribute nearly 600,000 views.

Since then, the video has been viewed more than 3 million times with only YouTube and Facebook. Which leads us to believe that to get to be one of the hottest vids on the internet, you need to build up ridiculous number of views in the first 24 hours and have content that would actually catch the eye of whoever has their finger on the button for the YouTube homepage.

What do we learn from The Single Ladies?

1. Search for a video search term that's HOT

2. Showcase your talent - whether that be music, comedy, interesting facts no one knows about, whatever.

3. Shoot multiple angles of your video and mix them into a video that keeps interest.

4. Post on Social Networks right away.

5. (Pray that the YouTube gods love it)

As the music industry surrenders its awesome power to the people, Democracy lives in the Worldwide Web, artists make their name with only a camera and a beautiful talent and the Snowball rolls on...

Shameless plug: My partners and I make TV Commercials, training videos, DVD's, and web videos for LizardLand Video - the Premier Phoenix Video Production House. Check us out!

Laughing at Nudie Pictures Does Not Make Phil DeFranco Popular

YouTube Annotations do.

For those out there who presume - as I naively did before starting to observe the Snowball - that YouTube is exclusively for posting light-hearted or incredible things  like skateboarding dogs

Skateboarding dog with over 10 million views

...or pranking your gullible wife into doing something silly

A man who has way more views than he deserves, not to mention a wife he doesn't deserve

...I must let you in on the YouTube Viral Video Secret I've discovered!

YouTube videos have FLASH LAYERS. One of them is the video file, itself. The layer directly on top of it is a flash layer into which you can easily add an ANNOTATION - kinda like a POST-SCRIPT NOTE to your video in case you - unlike me - are not a kickass video editor and want to make a quick correction or a little callout to someone or even a link to other content on YouTube or elsewhere. 

Here's how to annotate.

A hilarious comedian known as Phil DeFranco, PhillyD, or "sxephil" is an internet celebrity (No, they really do exist) who takes advantage of this technology to make his THRICE-WEEKLY VIDEOS qualify as instantly viral and exposes a great secret to making your videos go viral. He annotates a LINK TO THE PREVIOUS VIDEO and a LINK TO THE FOLLOWING VIDEO.

Most Recent PhillyD Show

Every episode of the PhillyD is hilarious, but then so is my dearly-beloved We Got That B-Roll (click) Video and a sister video also made by  comedic troupe "Cream" called Sinus Rinse Addiction (click). And yet my Sergey videos don't generate as much as a tenth of the traffic that PhillyD does. 

Why? I have a theory...

Phil-philes like myself only watch Philly DeFranco once in a while but when we do, we can't get enough with a single 5-minute episode so we allow ourselves to be suckered into the convenient buttons that take you to the following or previous video. Amused, we can't help but eventually either comment, rate or forward, embed and link to his videos where people can also rate, comment and embed/link. So, using your own video to promote your other videos in order to leverage advantage of the fact that if someone is looking at your YouTube Video, now, then they have subconsciously alotted at least an hour to waste on the internet because their wife is napping or their boss has taken up golf on Wednesday mornings or something.

Clever, sxephil! Clever!

What do we learn from being "Phil'd in" by sxephil?

1. Produce a SERIES OF VIDEOS, not just one video.

2. ANNOTATE LINKS betwixt your series of videos.

3. Make the content of the videos EPISODIC by posing it as a show and not posting all of the videos at once.

One day, there will be chips implanted into our brains that calculate what we want and serve it up on the screen in front of us and become the ultimate ruin of our species.

Until then, the Snowball rolls on.

Shameless self-promotion - Joe Rawlins is a partner with in LizardLand Video www.lizardlandvideo.com the Premier Phoenix Video production firm.

Joe