Going Viral - The Game Changer

The main purpose or idea behind the kind of videos that I create for my youtube channel, it's the hope that they will be shared, or passed along. In the internet world, we call this "going viral".

BIKE VIDEO GOES VIRAL:


The first real youtube video that we made, "Huge Bike Jump Into A Pond 35 Feet Into The Air", we made it with the idea that it would go "viral"... The first day it got around 1000 hits, within the next couple following days, it was getting around 80,000 hits a day :) It ended up on the front page of collegehumor.com and todaysbigthing.com, and gawker.com, which are all huge in the internet world, for those who are not familiar with those websites :) Since then it has been passed on facebook 40,846 times... but who's counting? :) 3 months later the video is almost at a million hits. We reached the 800,000 hit mark though within almost 3 weeks, and since then it dropped. I have below the graph of how the bike video went viral because of it being posted on these major sites.

HUGE BIKE JUMP HITS STATISTICS:

After the bike video went viral, it dropped pretty gradually, as you can see in the graph... However since that time, for the last two months it has consistently been hitting 2000 hits a day since that time, on its own because of the number of people that got exposed to it originally.

BREAKDANCING VIDEO GOES VIRAL:

After that video, the next "viral" video that I made was the "breakdancing to classical music". I put that one up... and it did alright... It slowly grew... however it then ended up on huffingtonpost.com, which is one of the biggest blogs/news internet sites in the world. Here is a graph I got off of youtube where you can see exactly one the video went viral, and how after that it dropped.

BREAKDANCING VIDEO:

WORLD's WIDEST SLIP AND SLIDE:


Just recently my youtube video, "Worlds widest slip and slide" went viral. It had been online for a month and a half, and it had gained around 9000 hits.. however, the day smosh.com posted it on there website, which was yesterday, it went from 9000 hits to 58,000 hits over night. I have no problem waking up to that :)

Smosh.com posted it on their website, on their facebook, and they twittered it as well, and they have over 100,000 followers, so it was huge for me.

Here's a graph below of how fast the hits rose on the video itself.

SLIP AND SLIDE VIDEO AFTER SMOSH.COM POSTED IT:

Now when a video goes viral on your youtube channel.. It doesn't effect just that video, it effects every video on your channel... significantly.

First off, on the slip and slide video.. Youtube has allowed people who upload videos to put "annotations" at the end of them. These annotations are buttons, that people can push to go to other links, or videos. At the end of the slip and slide video, I had 3 other videos pop up with links/annotations, to other videos on my channel, to the HUGE BIKE JUMP VIDEO, the WASHINGTON ENCHANTMENT video, and THE RABBITS FOOT video.... Because of this, these 3 videos get the next most hits on my channel. To show you an example of just how many hits, this is the effect it had in one day, because my slip and slide video went viral.

WASHINGTON ENCHANTMENT VIDEO:

RABBITS FOOT VIDEO:

HUGE BIKE JUMP:

So those videos above were the videos that were linked with the SLIP AND SLIDE video that was on smosh.com. So they had the most hits out of my channel, however, that didn't stop people from wanting to see more on the channel.. Now looking at other videos.. that had no connection at all to the SLIP AND SLIDE video, except for the fact that they were on my channel... Here's the graphs for those that I got off youtube.

WAIMEA CLIFF JUMP video:

CANADA INCEPTION video:

FLYING IN SLOW MOTION:

So once again there is a HUGE effect in play because of one video going "viral".
This also has a different reflection on my subscribers, and my main channel views.

SUBSCRIBERS OVER THE LAST 14 DAYS:

MAIN CHANNEL HITS OVER LAST 14 DAYS:

CONCLUSION:
So, what's the conclusion? Well,.. have more videos go viral :)

Just looking at all the statistics.. Here's what the statistics prove...

1. My youtube subscribers triples, and continues to rise exponentially.
2. Annotations videos that feed off the main viral video get 9 TIMES MORE HITS THEN NORMAL. If you look at the bike,Washington, and rabbits foot video, this is true without question.
3. EVERY OTHER video on my channel gets double to 4 times more hits then normal.
4. My main youtube channel views triples.

It always seems like part luck though with this.. because so much is dependent on cyberspace once that video goes out there.. however, there are certain formulas that do work, and I would like to be considered one day, one of the youtube channels that can constantly produce "one hit viral wonders" on a regular basis, time will tell :)

Websites like collegehumor,smosh, and huffingtonpost have changed the game for me, by them posting there videos on there main pages, it has gotten my name out there so much further then anything I could have done on my own, it's been the game changer, it's given me the chance to compete with the big dogs.