Viral Videos: (C.) Critical Analysis
What do
have in common? They are all viral videos.
Viral Videos are extremely popular videos that are shared by audiences through many different means and mediums, most commonly YouTube. These videos are often short, simple, and funny; made by amateurs or non-professional videographers; deal with current issues; and comment on popular culture. The phenomenon of the popularity of seemingly random videos is only capable because of the internet. Internet access allows people from all over the world to make, watch, and share clips of whatever interests they have and also see what is interesting to others. The traffic of video-sharing (a.k.a. file-sharing) websites can generate large amounts of income for companies, which led to the purchase of YouTube by internet giant Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, clearly an enormous amount of money for a simply-made website.
Beyond the monetary success of sites and companies- YouTube (everything), iFilm (semi-professional short films), Dailymotion (mostly home video content), and Vimeo (television and movie clips)- advertisers have been keen to make their own campaigns popular through the same formula of other viral videos, or some day find their own product being popularized throughout the world wide web. This has even led to a viral video being spread around detailing of a fake institution to learn about making a successful viral video. Viral videos may come from commercials through television but only make the leap from the internet to television through news broadcasts, commodification, or insane amounts of conventional media coverage.
So if you feel left out of the loop during a conversation by the office water cooler, chances are that you haven’t seen the latest viral video.
