How To Make A Viral Video

I find it fascinating how popular viral videos can become. It is interesting to see how fast videos become internet sensations through sites like youtube.com. Perhaps one of the first instances of a video going viral was with OK Go’s music video for “Here it goes again.” This video first showed up more than 4 years ago and currently has almost 53 million views. OK Go has had little mainstream success but they are huge internet sensations. One of their videos just released this month already has 6 million views. Here is a CNN interview done with OK Go discussing how to make viral videos. If you don’t have time to read the whole interview here is a short except on how OK Go views the Internet as freeing and revolutionary.

CNN: How has the internet changed the way you communicate with your audience?

It's difficult to answer the question because embedded in the question is this idea that the internet is this separate space now. And it's hard for me to see the digital space as a distinct annex of physical space. Everything you will do to make this story will go through a computer.

All of my communication is online, half of our art has been online, and so our social spaces are all online. It's like the internet has changed our communication with our fans in the way it has changed our communication with everyone in the world.

However, trying to look at it in sort of a more traditional light, it's been completely revolutionary and completely freeing. We never particularly wanted to have our work mediated by anyone else ... The internet has allowed for us to sidestep a lot of those [corporate, radio, TV and record label] agendas by making stuff that we can give directly to people, and by relying on a smaller number of people to care more rather than getting more and more bodies through the line at Wal-Mart.