Viral video
Viral videos are videos that become popular through a viral process of Internet sharing, primarily through video sharing websites such as YouTube as well as social media and email. For a video to be shareable or spreadable, it must focus on the social logics and cultural practices that have enabled and popularized these new platforms.
Viral videos may be serious, and some are deeply emotional, but many more are based more on entertainment and comedy. Notable early examples include televised comedy sketches, such as The Lonely Islands "Lazy Sunday" and "Dick in a Box", Numa Numa videos, The Evolution of Dance, Chocolate Rain on YouTube; and web-only productions such as I Got a Crush... on Obama. and some events that have been captured by eyewitnesses can get viral such as Battle at Kruger.
One commentator called the Kony 2012 video the most viral video in history, but "Gangnam Style" received one billion views in five months and was the most viewed video on YouTube from 2012 until "Despacito".
History
Videos were shared long before YouTube or even the Internet by word-of-mouth, film festivals, VHS tapes, and even to fill time gaps during the early days of cable. Perhaps the earliest was Reefer Madness, a 1936 "educational" film that circulated under several different titles. It was rediscovered by Keith Stroup, founder of NORML, who circulated prints of the film around college film festivals in the 1970s. The company who produced the prints, New Line Cinema, was so successful they began producing their own films. The most controversial was perhaps a clip from a newscast from Portland, Oregon in November 1970. In the clip, the disposal of a beached whale carcass by dynamite is documented, including the horrific aftermath of falling mist and chunks since the exclusion zone was not big enough. The exploding whale story obtained urban legend status in the Northwest and gained new interest in 1990 after Dave Barry wrote a humorous column about the event, leading to copies being distributed over bulletin board systems around 1994.The "humorous home video" genre dates back at least to 1963, when the TV series "Your Funny, Funny Films" debuted. The series showcased amusing film clips, mostly shot on 8mm equipment by amateurs. The idea was revived in 1989 with America's Funniest Home Videos, a series described by an ABC executive as a one-time "reality-based filler special" that was inspired by a segment of a Japanese variety show, Fun With Ken and Kaito Chan, which borrowed clips from various Japanese home video shows as well. Now the longest-running primetime entertainment show in the history of ABC, the show's format includes showing clips of home videos sent in to the show's committee, and then the clips are voted on by a live filmed audience, with the winners awarded a monetary prize.
During the internet's public infancy, the 1996 Seinfeld episode "The Little Kicks" addresses the distribution of a viral video through non-online, non-broadcast means. It concludes with the citizens of New York City having individually witnessed Elaine's terrible dancing via a bootleg copy of a feature film, establishing that the dancing footage had effectively gone viral.
Viral videos began circulating as animated GIFs small enough to be uploaded to websites over dial-up Internet access or through email as attachments in the early 1990s. Videos were also spread on message boards, P2P file sharing sites, and even coverage from mainstream news networks on television. Two of the most successful viral videos of the early internet era were "The Spirit of Christmas" and "Dancing Baby". "The Spirit of Christmas" surfaced in 1995, spread through bootleg copies on VHS and on the internet, as well as an AVI file on the PlayStation game disc for Tiger Woods 99, later leading to a recall. The popularity of the videos led to the creation of the television series South Park after it was picked up by Comedy Central. "Dancing Baby", a 3D-rendered dancing baby video made in 1996 by the creators of Character Studio for 3D Studio MAX, became something of a mid-late 1990s cultural icon in part due to its exposure on worldwide commercials, editorials about Character Studio, and the popular television series Ally McBeal. The video may have first spread when Ron Lussier, the animator who cleaned up the raw animation, began passing the video around his workplace, LucasArts.
Later distribution of viral videos on the internet before YouTube, which was created in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006, were mostly through websites dedicated to hosting humorous content, such as Newgrounds and YTMND, although message boards such as eBaum's World and Something Awful were also instrumental. Notably, some content creators hosted their content on their own websites, such as Joel Veitch's site for his band Rather Good, which hosted quirky Flash videos for the band's songs; the most popular was "We Like the Moon", whose viral popularity on the internet prompted Quiznos to parody the song for a commercial. The most famous self-hosted home of viral videos is perhaps Homestar Runner, released in the early 2000’s and is still running today In the mid 2000’s more social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter gave users the option to share videos causing them to go viral. More recently, there has been a surge in viral videos on video sharing sites such as YouTube, partially because of the availability of affordable digital cameras. Beginning in December 2015, YouTube introduced a "trending" tab to alert users to viral videos using an algorithm based on comments, views, "external references", and even location. The feature reportedly does not use viewing history to serve up related content, and the content may be curated by YouTube.
Modern viral videos tend to come from TikTok and Instagram, TikTok hosts short form content in a portrait format, these short videos are often meant to be humorous, while others focus mainly on music, viral videos commonly came from music related short videos and popular dances, TikTok was a large internet sensation causing many viral videos to be made.
TikTok and Contemporary Viral Video Culture
In recent scholarship, TikTok has been identified as a major platform for the production and circulation of contemporary viral videos. Researchers argue that TikTok’s short-form video format and algorithmic distribution systems facilitate rapid imitation, remixing, and dissemination of audiovisual content, accelerating the viral spread of trends, sounds, and performances.Studies emphasize that viral videos on TikTok often function as participatory cultural practices rather than singular media artifacts, with users collectively shaping meaning through repetition and variation. Scholars in digital humanities further note that such viral content can serve as a form of bottom-up documentation of everyday cultural expression, while also raising concerns about platform governance and algorithmic visibility.
Qualification
There are several ways to gauge whether a video has "gone viral". The statistic perhaps most mentioned is number of views, and as sharing has become easier, the threshold requirement of sheer number of views has increased. YouTube personality Kevin Nalty recalls on his blog: "A few years ago, a video could be considered 'viral' if it hit a million views", but says as of 2011, only "if it gets more than 5 million views in a 3–7-day period" can it be considered "viral". To compare, 2004's Numa Numa received two million hits on Newgrounds in its first three months.Nalts also posits three other considerations: buzz, parody, and longevity, which are more complex ways of judging a viral video's views. Buzz addresses the heart of the issue; the more a video is shared, the more discussion the video creates both online and offline. What he emphasizes is notable is that the more buzz a video gets, the more views it gets. A study on viral videos by Carnegie Mellon University found that the popularity of the uploader affected whether a video would become viral, and having the video shared by a popular source such as a celebrity or a news channel also increases buzz. It is also part of the algorithm YouTube uses to predict popular videos. Parodies, spoofs and spin-offs often indicate a popular video, with long-popular video view counts given with original video view counts as well as additional view counts given for the parodies. Longevity indicates if a video has remained part of the Zeitgeist.
Reasons for popularity
Due to their societal impact and marketability, viral videos attract attention in both advertising and academia. Several theories attempt to determine why viral videos are spread and what makes a video go viral.Social Learning Theory was introduced by Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura in 1977. He proposed that people learn by observing others, particularly those perceived as being influential or like themselves, and then imitate the observed behaviors, especially when those behaviors lead to rewards such as attention or approval. This process is known as vicarious reinforcement, where people model their behavior based on the observed success or failure of others. In the case of viral videos, when someone sees a dance, challenge, or trend gaining millions of views or likes, they may be motivated to replicate it in hopes of achieving similar social recognition.
Recent studies support the Social Learning Theory explanation. A 2023 study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University examined how adolescents interact with social media content using Bandura’s theory as a framework. The researchers analyzed data from 9,008 adolescents aged 10 to 14 who participated in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the most extensive long-term study of brain development in the United States. The Social Media Addiction Questionnaire was used to measure problematic social media use, including compulsive checking of social media apps, requiring more time on them to feel satisfied, or letting them interfere with school. The Alcohol Expectancy Questionnaire-Adolescent Brief was used to assess the adolescents' beliefs about alcohol. The study found that youth who were more deeply engaged with social media were more likely to adopt both positive and negative beliefs about alcohol based on what they saw online. The authors concluded that adolescents may learn behaviors and expectations by watching influencers or peers post content that receives praise or attention. Although the study focused on alcohol, the same learning process helps explain how viral videos influence behavior, especially when those videos show socially rewarded content that is easy to imitate.
A 2024 study by researchers from Macao Polytechnic University, Monash University, and the University of Manchester conducted a systematic scoping review of 37 academic research articles published between 2014 and 2023, using the Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Extension for Scoping Review framework to examine the application of Social Learning Theory in public health education. They reviewed studies that employed surveys, interviews, focus groups, and randomized controlled trials to gain an understanding of learning behaviors. They found that Social Learning Theory effectively explained how adolescents observe and adopt behaviors in less structured environments, such as on social media platforms. Videos were incredibly impactful when they featured relatable role models, emotional content, and opportunities for peer interaction, traits common to many viral videos. The study concluded that people are more likely to copy behaviors they see modeled in video content when those behaviors appear easy, popular, or socially approved. These features help explain why certain videos go viral: they are emotionally engaging, easy to share, and encourage viewers to join in on trends that offer visible social rewards.
A viral video's longevity often relies on a hook which draws the audience to watch it. The hook, often a memorable phrase or moment, is able to become a part of the viral video culture after being shown repeatedly. The hooks, or key signifiers, are not able to be predicted before the videos become viral. The early view pattern of a viral video can be used to forecast its peak day in future. Notable examples include "All your base are belong to us", based on the poorly translated video game Zero Wing, which was first distributed in 2000 as a GIF animation and became popular for the grammatically incorrect hook of its title, and Don Hertzfeldt's 2000 Academy Awards Best Animated Short Film nomination "Rejected" with the quotable hooks "I am a banana" and "My spoon is too big!" Another early video was the Flash animation "The End of the World", created by Jason Windsor and uploaded to Albino Blacksheep in 2003, with quotable hooks such as "but I'm le tired" and "WTF, mates?"
Researchers have found that emotional response plays a key role in determining whether a video or online content is likely to be shared. Two experimental studies investigated how emotions influence the likelihood of forwarding internet videos. In the first study, 256 undergraduate participants were shown videos categorized as funny, cute, disgusting, anger-inducing, or neutral. Videos that evoked positive emotions, such as amusement, were significantly more likely to be shared than those that elicited negative or neutral reactions. The second study found that social factors also influenced sharing: participants were more likely to forward an anger-inducing video when they believed it came from an out-group member, suggesting that emotional arousal and social identity interact in viral spread. The authors concluded that emotional contagion, or the tendency to feel and pass along others' emotions, helps explain why specific videos gain traction online.
Two professors at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania also found that uplifting stories were more likely to be shared on the New York Times' web site than disheartening ones. They analyzed nearly 7,000 New York Times articles to understand the types of content that appeared on the platform’s "most emailed" list. Their findings showed that content evoking high-arousal emotions, whether positive or negative, was more likely to be shared than content triggering low-arousal emotions, such as sadness. The researchers also conducted controlled experiments confirming that high-arousal emotions stimulate action, such as sharing, by increasing psychological arousal. Together, these studies suggest that viral videos often spread not only because of their entertainment value or novelty but because they evoke strong emotional responses that motivate users to share them, amplifying their reach through emotional and social networks.
Some researchers suggest that sharing behavior may also be driven by a desire to shape one’s online identity. Chartbeat, a company that analyzes online traffic, compiled data comparing the amount of time spent reading an article and the number of times it was shared and found that people frequently post articles on Twitter without having read them, indicating the act of sharing may serve more to project an image and boost ego than to spread information.