Short answers, pulled from the story.
Reefer Madness, a 1936 educational film, is considered among the earliest examples of footage that spread through informal networks rather than official distribution. NORML founder Keith Stroup rediscovered it and circulated prints at college film festivals in the 1970s, making it one of the first documented cases of content going viral before the internet existed.
As of 2011, YouTube personality Kevin Nalty described the threshold as more than five million views in a three-to-seven-day period. Earlier, a video reaching one million views was considered viral, but the bar rose as sharing became easier and more widespread.
"Gangnam Style" (2012) received one billion views within five months of its release and became the most viewed video on YouTube from 2012 until "Despacito" took the record in 2017. Kony 2012, by comparison, reached about 34 million views in 5.7 hours and 100 million views in six days.
Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura introduced social learning theory in 1977, proposing that people imitate behaviors they observe in others, especially when those behaviors earn social rewards like attention or approval. In the context of viral videos, viewers who see a dance or challenge gain millions of likes may replicate it to achieve similar recognition.
Barack Obama posted over 1,800 videos to his YouTube channel during the 2008 campaign, while John McCain posted over 300. Will.i.am's "Yes We Can" won an Emmy for Best New Approaches in Daytime Entertainment, and a 2008 Pew Research Center study found approximately 2% of participants were getting their news from non-traditional sources like YouTube.
The popularity of "The Spirit of Christmas," a viral video that surfaced in 1995, led Comedy Central to pick it up as a television series. The original video spread through bootleg VHS copies and early internet connections, and an AVI file embedded on the Tiger Woods 99 PlayStation game disc later caused a product recall.