Once upon a time, on Valentine’s day of the year 2005, Youtube was born. And with it the untapped possibility of online video virality.
Since then, we’ve had some of the most iconic characters reach internet fame: Chocolate Rain, Double Rainbow, Leave Britney Alone, The Numa Numa Guy… Today we have thousands of Youtube celebrities and a track record of viral videos that would take weeks to watch — to watch the actual entirety the Youtube library it would take you more than 60,000 years.
At SWISH, we know all about viral videos, we are a platform for video discovery, so we are basically video scientists. So what makes a video viral?
Cue definition:
What we care about at SWISH isn’t exactly the number of shares and views a video gets, but what the psychological drivers that make a video go viral are. These are the key to selecting the videos that make it on the app.
We did extensive research on this matter and we came to the conclusion that these factors are:
- Emotion → The video should evoke a powerful, positive, emotional response.
- Social Capital → The driving force behind people talking about content, basically, how shareable the video is.
- Phenomenon → The quality of the video, displaying masterful levels of human skill or a natural event of significant phenomenon.
The combination of these three things won’t necessarily make a video go viral, there is no recipe for virality, since you can’t really controll social-capital and phenomenon is something hard to fabricate. But let’s look at a classic viral video and see how these elements are combined:
David After Dentist, 2009 → 134,667,426 views
David After Dentist combines all the psychological drivers of virality. First of all, it triggers happy, cheerful emotions, since it’s a funny video with a kid. In terms of phenomenon, this is a good example of the first of a chain of similar funny videos. DAD was the beggining of a trend, to film your friends and family after surgery while they say funny sh*t, however, none of them have been as successful as DAD, because it was the first — Phenomenon ☑️. Finally, due to the combination of strong emotional triggers and surprise, David After Dentist is highly shareable content: A viral video in it’s purest form.
Tickling the psychological triggers of virality is something we take pride in doing here at SWISH, which is why we try to give our users an amazing viewing experience with every video they swish through. However, we understand that everyone is unique in the way they are entertained, which is why we combine this knowledge with science that selects videos specifically for each user. It’s all about the experience :)
