The Key to Making your YouTube Video Go Viral
Class was about to start and I was chatting with my friend about a YouTube video she saw earlier that day. She was talking about how funny the video was that this girl was playing the clarinet in an odd way. So after class I logged onto YouTube to watch the video, however forgot what the video was called. I typed in “funny girl playing clarinet” into YouTube to search for the video. The video I decided to watch was not the first video that popped up, rather it was the video with the most views. This action of me choosing the video to watch based off of the views follows the idea of information-based copying.
The reason I clicked on the fourth video was because it had far more views than any other YouTube video that popped up from the search. I had subconsciously figured that more views meant that it was worth my time to watch the video since clearly the people before me had reason to watch the video. This directly falls in line with the idea of information-based copying. By noticing that one video had a lot of views, I gathered the information that the video must be more important (or more popular) than any of the other videos on the page.
I believe, this information-based copying actually plays a huge role in making videos viral. A simple video of a cat playing with a toy is not a video that you would randomly click the play button to watch—unless it has 2 million views. If you see this amount of views for a simple video, than you assume that if 2 million other people watched the video, than you might enjoy watching it too and so you therefore watch it. I was interested in this theory (that videos go viral based on information-based copying) and tried to do research for it for this blog post. The attached article (as well as all other articles I found) goes through specifics of how to get more views on your videos. They believe that if you make playlists, or get more subscribers, or use annotations that your video has the potential to gain many more views and potentially become viral. However, I think there is much more to a video gaining views than just the task of adding playlists, annotations, etc. rather it is the idea of information-based copying that could actually lead to a huge amount of video fame.
https://blog.hootsuite.com/get-views-youtube/