Secrets of the Web’s Most Popular Video EVER

Distribution, Distribution, Distribution. Photo credit Reed Kavner

In a rather excited blogpost (lots of exclamation points!!… count them) Visible Measures, a company that makes it possible to track video views online, has listed the top viral videos of all time.

Number one is “Soulja Boy Crank That” logging in at 356,300,000 views.

Check out the video. It’s very very smart. Do you think its a coincidence that the most watched online video of all time does the following things so well:

Branding: the song has the singer’s name in it — and it’s no cameo.. “Soulja Boy” basically IS the hook/chorus. This makes it easy to remember the artist, easy to talk about, easy to find again.

Calling people to action: the video is jampacked with imagery of, well, people watching the video. And many times they are watching it together. What a terrific, not-so-subtle reminder to share the video and enjoy it with others.

The thing is built to work. Crank dat.

Bud Light Offers Up a Nice Viral. Cheers

Viral marketing is a hits business… like the movie business, the venture capital business, or possibly most businesses. You have to try things. There are no guarantees.

When it works, it is a beautiful thing, you end up with a many people engaged in your brand. You pay for the creative work and webhosting (if it takes place online) but you don’t have to buy media, e.g. TV time or print ads.

The “viewers” become the “media”. Nice!

Bud Light’s Making Faces is a good one. You can animate canned photos of people or animals—or upload your own—and make the picture say what you want it to via text-to-voice software. Profanity etc. is filtered.. but you can defeat the filter by deliberate misspelling. In fact you sometimes need to misspell words anyway to get the text-to-voice to work really well for you.

The technology behind Making Faces is called Veepers and it’s from dotcom survivor Pulse in San Francisco. Check your Pulse.