Case Study of a Hit Viral Video

One offshoot of SoCal Film Group is Monkey With A Shotgun, a group formed for the purpose of making sketch comedy shorts for internet distribution. The name isn't just a moniker for the group, it's also a sort of operating philosophy. Make a lot of different stuff fast and hope to hit some target somewhere.

Over the last 6 weeks or so, Monkey's 20th video, Spanish For Your Nanny, has succeeded in hitting a target, and is approaching half a million views on the sites we track (and likely many more on sites we don't!). There's several reasons for the success of the video, but those are for a later post.

Instead, I'm going to look at how the video has spread and what that might indicate about the nature of a viral video.

All of Monkey's videos are posted to a variety of sites, about a dozen in all. We've found that there's no real way to predict which video will succeed on which site, so we post all our videos on all our sites. We've been featured on a number of them, but that always occurs at the whim of the site's editors, and isn't anything we rely on. While a featured spot on the front page of Yahoo or Myspace can certainly bring in a number of hits, it's usually a brief burst and doesn't seem to carry over to other sites very often (though it can provide an ancillary boost to our other videos on the same site).

In this case, we'd posted Nanny to the usual sites, and we were getting a bit more than the usual number of views, and the video had been "stolen" and posted on other sites a fair amount, but nothing really spectacular, outside of one site where we had been featured (JoeCartoon).

A couple of weeks after I had posted, a friend sent me an IM "Hey, you never stumbled Nanny". He meant that I'd never given the video a thumbs up via the StumbleUpon browser plugin. StumbleUpon is a social network / link sharing site, in which your friends in your network see sites you've given a thumbs up, and vice versa. We've had some success using this and other similar sites, and I usually Stumble a new video post on YouTube as a matter of course. I use YouTube as the preferred Stumble site because it's the most popular video site, and a video there benefits more from a greater view total than on any other site.

In any case, my friend Stumbled the site, and I immediately seconded it. The seconding serves two purposes, one it's a vote of confidence in the first Stumble, which makes it more likely to be seen by others, and two it combines my stumble network with my friend's, increasing the number of people the video can be exposed to.

Nanny caught on with the Stumble crowd, and racked up a number of views from people Stumbling on the page over the next couple of days.

But then the big step happened- the video got added to the FunWall application on Facebook. Someone, likely one of the Stumblers, started "forwarding" the video via FunWall, and the view count really took off.

To understand why, it's important to understand the nature of FunWall, and of Facebook in general.

Among other things, Facebook is very good at reducing what I call "link friction" to almost nothing. The key element of a viral video is getting the link to the video into new hands. Thus the ease of passing the link is crucial. The effort involved in passing the link can be seen as "friction" working against the momentum a link builds as it's passed from person to person. Having to cut-and-paste a link, for example, is a relatively high level of friction, as each stage of passing the link on requires that each person actively take several steps to do so. Something like StumbleUpon has somewhat lower friction. All you have to do is click the Thumbs Up icon in the plugin. Then others are more likely to see what you've approved.

But this is a sort of passive forwarding, low friction as it may be. Facebook encourages a more active level of participation. Since the advent of the application platform on Facebook, the culture of the FB community has become such that sending invites, links, and applications to your friends is a natural part of your Facebook usage. One of the most popular applications on Facebook is called FunWall. FunWall extends the functionality of your "wall", which is the part of your Facebook profile page where friends can write messages for you. FunWall adds two features relevant to viral videos- one, it embeds video from sites like YouTube. Two, and perhaps more importantly, it includes a "Forward!" button on each FunWall post. Clicking this button allows you to forward the posts to any number of friends.

So FunWall both encourages active participation and does so with almost no Link Friction at all. It's like magic pixie dust for viral videos.

Soon after the FunWall wave started, I started getting reports of Spanish For Your Nanny being emailed around as a file attachment. People I don't know were sending it to other people I don't know and it was eventually making its way back to me. This was Old Skool virality! Spirit Of Christmas stuff! It's interesting to note this came later than the social network spread. It's a good example of a higher friction process, but one that a viral video may grow into if the circumstances are right.

In recent days the video has gotten boosts from being featured on high profile sites such as those of talk radio hosts and so on. In some ways, this is sort of last stage virality, when the video bubbles up high enough for at least minor attention from mainstream media.

The important thing to note in this whole process is that the big gatekeepers have come at the end. Prior to that, the spread of the video has been accomplished by thousands of nano-gatekeepers, individuals deciding to either pass the video on to their friends or not. No one of these individuals has a lot of push in making the video spread, but collectively they can make a video spread much further and much faster than any one give large gatekeeper.

The ultimate lesson is rather straightforward- get your video in front of as many people as possible, using as many tools as you can to do so. You don't know which of them will work best, so use them all. Take special care to use those tools that put your video in front of people in a way that makes it easy for them to spread it.

I hope this has all made at least some sense, and I look forward to adding to it as Monkey With A Shotgun has more videos on the loose!