Viral Videos: The Sites You Need to Most Effectively Distract Yourself

Viral Video Chart has named President Obama's Feb. 24 address to Congress, above, the most popular video of the week.

Today my colleague in audience development, Haley Lovett, alerted me to the site Youshouldhaveseenthis.com, otherwise known as “Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of the 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced on the Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something.” Rutter provides us with 99 (and counting, presumably) links to some very popular—that is to say, viral—videos.

Scan through Rutter's list to gauge how much time you have personally wasted on the Internet watching amusing, amazing or strange footage. Whether you’re a novice or a viral video scholar, there are a few more resources below to enhance your particular skill level.

Typing in “viral video” on SweetSearch yielded this gem: Television Week’s Viral Video page, which neatly enumerates must-see videos of the week. The site “does it by the numbers, tracking down the most-played clips on the most popular video Web sites” using Nielsen/NetRatings.

Viral Video Chart has an entire domain devoted to the practice of collecting popular videos, trawling through the top video sites so you don’t have to.

The Webby Awards site is a great source of excellent online video and film. Watch nominees from 2008 here.

For those interested in the general phenomenon of viral video, Stereogum’s sister site Videogum published a brief history of viral video in late 2008, arguing that 2006 may have actually been the peak for viral videos. (Don’t worry, they do include several 2006 videos in the article.)

I also came across the 2008 story “Behind the Viral Video: What’s Fake, What’s Real” on NPR. This story’s contributors “talk about the highly controlled world of ‘viral video’ and what's real, what's fake and how video became a big gun in the online marketing arsenal.”

Lastly, TechCrunch’s “Can Viral Videos Be Repeated?” takes a look at the viral video sequel and whether it’s ever as popular as the original, using the video that arguably started it all, “Evolution of Dance,” as a guinea pig.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Call it a shameless plug, but I found all of the above links using SweetSearch.

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