In my look for a You Tube video gone viral , I went to the obvious place: Facebook. I didn't have to look too far into my friend's links to find a good example.
Nothing beats cute babies. A video with twin babies laughing at each other, just that with nothing else going on; no special effects, explosions or famous actors, gets over 50 million views on You Tube.
Obviously, babies are as close to a universal experience as it gets. Of the 2 Billion people on the internet, most of them have kids and the rest have babies in their families, used to be babies, etc. So it's not surprising that a cute baby video would go viral.
What I find amazing is, for a video that had so many views, it is just not that compelling. Even as the father of twins, someone intrinsically wired to find babies (especially twins) cute, I didn't find this video to really be that interesting. Sure it is sweet and funny, but 50 million views? In the world of "cute-babies-laughing-on-you-tube", this just isn't that funny or interesting a video. There must be millions of videos with babies that are better than this one.
It is nowhere near as entertaining, for example, as a similar video with quadruplets, which only got 2 million views (obviously still a lot).
It seems that, like with many things, it is fairly inscrutable why a given video gets so popular. It depends on who forwards it to whom, how many people put it up on Facebook or Twitter. It's timing, chance and other random factors. Why is Lady Gaga so popular, when there must be so many other people in the world with at least as much talent? Random luck and other enigmatic factors.
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