Viral Video

Undoubtedly, nearly everyone is familiar with the term "viral video". However, few know what it actually means. How many views does it take for something to be considered "viral"?

According to Kevin Nalty, "A few years ago, a video could be considered "viral" if it hit a million views.... A video, I submit, is viral if it gets more than 5 million views in a 3-7 day period."

Due to the ambiguous nature of the term "viral video", it may do well to compare our knowledge against another definition. The following definition comes from Techopedia:

A viral video is any clip of animation or film that is spread rapidly through online sharing. Viral videos can receive millions of views as they are shared on social media sites, re-posted to blogs, sent in emails and so on. Most viral videos contain humor and fall into three broad categories:

-Unintentional Viral Videos: Videos that the creators never intended to go viral. These videos may have been posted by the creator or shared with friends, who then spread the content.
-Humorous Viral Videos: Videos that have been created specifically to entertain people. If a video is funny enough, it will spread.
-Promotional Viral Videos: Videos that are designed to go viral with a marketing message to raise brand awareness. Promotional viral videos fall under viral marketing practices.

In order to illustrate the phenomenon of video sharing, let us turn our focus to a series of videos that recently gained a great deal of attention. 

Tony Serafini, a 38-year-old father, from Massachusetts, spends Saturday mornings with one of his daughters while his wife and eldest daughter are away at dance practice. He decided that he would make a video of his daughter rocking out in the background during their alone time. Noticing how popular his Vine videos were becoming, we decided to make the Saturday recordings a regular occurrence. 

His Vine Feed has more than 300,000 followers and his popularity is only growing. Serafini was just featured by the Today Show, which is how this author learned of the trending videos. The video featured about have gained a great deal of attention. It is a compilation of time spent with this youngest daughter, stretching throughout the course of three months. It was posted only four days ago and already has had over 1.5 million views. 

Depending on that you have chosen to define "viral videos", the 'One Man's Saturday' video may or may not fit the bit. It will be interesting to see how many more views that video gets over the next three days. Perhaps, with the additional publicity that it is receiving, it will successfully reach the 5 million viewers mark.