Anatomy of a Viral Sensation

What is it that makes a Youtube video ascend from the ranks of obscure upload to national news? Today we take a look at the elements of a recent viral sensation.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the two weeks, you've undoubtedly seen or heard about Miss South Carolina's ill-fated performance at the Miss Teen USA pageant:

RSS readers: click here for the video

The video was an instant sensation, garnering millions of hits and even resulting in a guest appearance on the Today show for the dumb-struck teen. Pronet has described how mediocrity can make a popular Youtube video in the past, but I felt that this video's meteoric rise deserved some more elaboration. Here are some elements that I feel this video possesses, which have contributed to its explosive popularity:

Humor - This one requires no explanation: The video will make any viewer laugh and/or cringe. More importantly, responses to the video almost rival the video itself in their humorousness:

RSS readers: click here for the video

Politics - This video is a political powder keg. For starters, there's the fact that the video takes place at a beauty pageant, an event some people perceive to be inherently sexist. Then there's the teen/child-exploitation angle of it all. And of course, finally, the fact that an American is having her ignorance of common sentence structure and world politics broadcast to the world. Take your pick.

Ownage - Approve of it or not, Digg users and Youtube users enjoy seeing videos of people getting "owned." Maybe it's a human desire to experience self- destruction vicariously, without actually having to go through the pain of it. Perhaps it has to do with the human impulse to feel better or smarter than others. Either way, seeing people get destroyed at something, physically, mentally, or spiritually, has become a popular Youtube past-time.

Somehow the people in this video were unintentionally able to combine all of these popular themes into a 2-minute package. Fame like this, unfortunately, doesn't come quite as easily to people who work at it.

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Glen Allsopp, September 12, 2007

I guess I've been living under a rock, I'm sure I had heard of it but had never watched it.

Yeah, I cringed ;)

David Brazeal, September 12, 2007

David, I think another element of this video's popularity is that it plays into stereotypes. People love being proven right -- and a lot of people believe beauty pageant contestants are dumb. (Especially the blonde ones.) So passing this on was a way of saying, "See? We were right!"

LonelyBloggers, September 13, 2007

I think this is a good example of how/why people are spending less time watching TV and spending more time on the internet (as per recent reports).

The internet is a much more interactive experience, you can share things with friends, TV is a one-way communication and you can see the problem with the limitations of that.

Who won that pageant anyway?

To get good results viewership for online video, it also comes down to tagging, keywords and getting the search engines to find your vids. Over the long term (if done right) will bring you a steady source of new visitors when you link back to your site. Video will continue to grow in importance moving forward for all of the internet marketers out there - Should be interesting.

Martin Calle, September 20, 2007

Humans are curious, and we all like to see a train wreck. That's why YouTube succeeds. This passes for mass entertainment today. And they fired Howard Cosell for saying NFL Sunday stopped a bored populace from rioting.