What Does It Mean To Go Viral?

After reading "What does it mean to go viral?' on Wonderopolis the Avengers compared two videos from Mr Bainbridge's class to see why one had lots of views and one didn't.

When a video posted on YouTube is very popular and has been viewed thousands of times it is known as a viral video. Viral videos can turn formerly unknown YouTube users into internet celebrities overnight. Mr Bainbridge has shared many videos of his students work on YouTube, one very successful video was ‘Room 5 Safe Crossing’ which attracted over 2000 views and another video that wasn’t very successful was ‘Ice Caps’ that had less than 10 views. So what made one video popular compared to the other?

Title

Both videos shared titles to let the audience know what to expect from the video. ‘Room 5 safety crossing’ told the audience that the video was by a classroom and included a message about crossing safely. On the other hand ‘Ice Caps’ did not reveal much information about the video. It certainly did not let the audience know what was contained in the video and who had made it. To capture people’s interests and gather views it is important to have a good title that will make people want to click.

Shared Online - Aadi and Jack

Another similarity between both videos are that they were both shared online by being uploaded to YouTube. ‘Ice Caps’ was also shared via the class blog. ‘Room 5 safety crossing’ was however also shared on Twitter and was then re- shared by Z energy, who used it in an advertising campaign. When sharing a video online it is your aim to get lots of views, to do this it is best to share your video on lots of platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr in order to reach the biggest audience possible. It is also beneficial to get re-shares from other people to boost the number of views.

Message/Moral - Moksha, Brianna S, Brianna L

‘Room 5 Safe Crossing’ and ‘Ice Caps’ both share a message or moral. ‘Room 5’s safe crossing’ message was to look before you cross the road. On the other hand the ice caps message was not to burn fossil fuels. The ‘Safe Crossing’s’ message related better to the target audience (children) whereas the ice cap was more related to adults, who would probably not watch a video made by children on YouTube.   

Animation - Harrison and Nikhil

Animation featured in both videos. The animation for ‘Room 5 Safety Crossing’ was stop motion using block head comic characters. In contrast the animation used for ‘Ice Caps’ was puppet pals. The Room 5 Safety Crossing had more views because the animation had a lot of humour and action and was a bit more exciting than the puppet pals animation.

Overall to have a video go viral we need to think about an interesting title, a message that relates to the audience, needs to be shared on social media platforms and should be interesting for people so they re-watch the video over and over again.