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!
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