Viral video

• 1. Introduction

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  Viral video is a term that describes footage spreading across the internet through sharing, not broadcasting. Before a single algorithm existed to measure it, a clip of a beached whale being blown up by dynamite in Portland, Oregon in November 1970 was making its way around fax machines and bulletin board systems. It took two decades and a humorous newspaper column to fully ignite the story, but once it did, copies circulated on early internet bulletin boards around 1994. That trajectory, dormant footage suddenly erupting into mass awareness, is the essential shape of the viral video. What makes something spread? Why do people share? And how did a format that began with bootleg VHS tapes become one of the defining forces in politics, advertising, and public health?

• 2. Before the Internet

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  Reefer Madness, a 1936 "educational" film, may be the earliest example of footage that spread through informal networks rather than official distribution. Keith Stroup, founder of NORML, rediscovered it and circulated prints around college film festivals in the 1970s. The company that produced those prints, New Line Cinema, found the venture so profitable that it pivoted to making its own films. The impulse to share funny or unusual footage on home video long predates the internet as well. A television series called "Your Funny, Funny Films" debuted in 1963, showcasing amateur clips shot mostly on 8mm equipment. That concept was revived in 1989 with America's Funniest Home Videos, which an ABC executive described as a one-time "reality-based filler special" inspired by a segment of a Japanese variety show called Fun With Ken and Kaito Chan. It became the longest-running primetime entertainment show in ABC history. Even a 1996 episode of Seinfeld, "The Little Kicks," dramatized what viral spread looked like without the internet: Elaine's embarrassing dancing spread through New York City on bootleg film copies, reaching everyone through informal channels.

• 3. Early Internet Era

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  "The Spirit of Christmas" surfaced in 1995 and spread through bootleg VHS copies, an AVI file embedded on the Tiger Woods 99 PlayStation disc, and early internet connections. That disc inclusion later caused a recall. The video's popularity directly led to the creation of South Park, which Comedy Central picked up after seeing how audiences responded. Around the same time, a 3D-rendered clip called "Dancing Baby," made in 1996 by the creators of Character Studio for 3D Studio MAX, became a mid-to-late 1990s cultural icon. It appeared on worldwide commercials, in editorials about the animation software, and on the television series Ally McBeal. The animator who cleaned up the raw footage, Ron Lussier of LucasArts, may have started the spread by passing it to colleagues. Before YouTube launched in 2005, platforms like Newgrounds and YTMND hosted most viral content. Self-hosted sites also thrived: Joel Veitch's website for his band Rather Good hosted Flash videos, the most popular being "We Like the Moon," which Quiznos later parodied for a commercial. Numa Numa received two million hits on Newgrounds in its first three months alone, a figure one 2015 article described as "a staggering number for the time." YouTube was created in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006, and with Facebook launching in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, the infrastructure for mass sharing was in place.

• 4. What Makes Something Viral

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  Albert Bandura introduced social learning theory at Stanford University in 1977, proposing that people learn by observing others they perceive as influential and then imitate those behaviors, especially when the behaviors earn rewards like attention or approval. A 2023 study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University applied this framework to 9,008 adolescents aged 10 to 14 participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the most extensive long-term study of brain development in the United States. It found that youth more deeply engaged with social media were more likely to adopt beliefs about alcohol based on what they saw online. A 2024 scoping review drawing on 37 academic articles published between 2014 and 2023, conducted by researchers from Macao Polytechnic University, Monash University, and the University of Manchester, found that videos featuring relatable role models, emotional content, and opportunities for peer interaction were the most impactful. Two Wharton School professors analyzed nearly 7,000 New York Times articles and found that high-arousal emotions, whether positive ones like awe or negative ones like anger, drove more sharing than low-arousal feelings such as sadness. Chartbeat data complicated the picture further: people frequently post articles on social media without having read them, suggesting that sharing can serve identity projection as much as information spread. YouTube personality Kevin Nalty recalled that a video earning a million views was once considered viral, but as of 2011 the bar had risen to more than five million views in a period of three to seven days.

• 5. Hooks and Longevity

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  "All your base are belong to us," drawn from the poorly translated video game Zero Wing, first spread as a GIF animation in 2000 and became widely known for the grammatical oddity of its title. Don Hertzfeldt's animated short "Rejected," which received a 2000 Academy Awards Best Animated Short Film nomination, generated its own quotable hooks, including "I am a banana" and "My spoon is too big!" Jason Windsor created "The End of the World" as a Flash animation and uploaded it to Albino Blacksheep in 2003, with lines such as "but I'm le tired" and "WTF, mates?" spreading through online communities. Researchers who study virality note that a video's hook, often a memorable phrase or image, is what allows it to become embedded in online culture through repetition. Parodies and spin-offs serve as a related signal; platforms like YouTube factor them into popularity assessments alongside the original view count. Carnegie Mellon University researchers found that the popularity of the uploader mattered, and that having a video shared by a celebrity or a news channel significantly increased its spread. The early view pattern of a video can also be used to forecast when it will peak, though the hooks themselves cannot be predicted in advance.

• 6. Viral Video and Power

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  In June 2007, "I Got a Crush... on Obama" appeared online, a music video that did not feature any celebrities and was entirely user-generated. It attracted mainstream media attention and became one of the defining political videos of the 2008 presidential cycle. John McCain posted over 300 videos to his YouTube channel during that campaign; Barack Obama posted over 1,800. Will.i.am's "Yes We Can" won an Emmy for Best New Approaches in Daytime Entertainment. A Pew Research Center study from 2008 found that approximately 2% of participants received their news from non-traditional sources like MySpace or YouTube. On the 3rd of December 2009, New York State Senator Diane Savino's speech in Albany in support of legalizing gay marriage attracted over 40,000 YouTube views; the legislation failed that year but was signed into law by Andrew Cuomo in 2011. Police accountability shifted as well. The Chicago Tribune reported that in 2015, nearly 1,000 civilians in the United States were shot and killed by police officers. Dash cam footage of the Chicago police killing of Laquan McDonald was released after 14 months under seal, sparked widespread public debate, and led Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to fire Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.

• 7. Money and Influence

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  "David After Dentist" earned more than $100,000 for its creators through YouTube's profit-sharing arrangements. Andrew Grantham, whose video "Ultimate Dog Tease" had been viewed more than 170 million times as of June 2015, signed a deal with Paramount Pictures in February 2012 for a feature film to be written by Alec Berg and David Mandel. Justin Bieber and Esmée Denters both launched their music careers through viral YouTube videos. By 2014, artists like Miley Cyrus, Eminem, and Katy Perry were drawing between 120 and 150 million hits a month, numbers exceeding many dedicated viral videos. Dove released its Evolution video in 2006 as what is considered one of the first viral marketing campaigns, and followed it with Real Beauty Sketches in 2013. Six of the ten most viral YouTube videos of 2015 were music-driven. The "Free Hugs Campaign," featuring music by the Sick Puppies, won a 2006 YouTube Award and led to its main subject, Juan Mann, appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show. YouTube introduced a "trending" tab in December 2015 using an algorithm based on comments, views, external references, and location, and it reportedly does not draw on individual viewing history.

• 8. Social Costs and Challenges

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  The Canadian high school student known as Star Wars Kid had his video first uploaded to the internet on the evening of the 14th of April 2003. His family eventually sued the individuals responsible for spreading it and accepted a financial settlement. In July 2010, an 11-year-old who used the pseudonym "Jessi Slaughter" was subjected to a sustained harassment campaign after videos they uploaded to Stickam and YouTube went viral, bringing widespread media discussion about cyberbullying as a consequence of viral spread. Social media challenges carry their own taxonomy of risk. A 2024 scoping review by Lara Kobilke and Antonia Markiewitz identified five features common to challenges: user-generated content, intent to replicate, viral dissemination, underlying motivation, and risk level. Their typology separates charitable challenges like the Ice Bucket Challenge from neutral entertainment-focused ones and from negative challenges designed for shock value or likely to cause injury, like the Skull Breaker Challenge. Academic research has concentrated more heavily on harmful cases, with less attention to neutral or positive ones. The consumer-pressure use case sits alongside these risks: "United Breaks Guitars" by Sons of Maxwell showed how viral video could be weaponized against a company, and Brian Finkelstein's 2006 video of a Comcast technician falling asleep on his couch while on hold became a case study in corporate accountability through public exposure.