Our common fascination with uncommon videos

I firmly believe that life is as different as all of the organisms that experience it, and even if we’re just talking about humans, that is an infinite amount of diversity. What’s important or interesting to me may be the last thing in the world you want to think about. Still, when you find a piece of video content that has made it onto one of YouTube’s “Most Viral” charts, there’s a pretty good chance that most people will want to watch it.

As you probably know, YouTube released its latest news about these charts about a month ago. The news and accompanying videos were subsequently splashed in feature stories in these media outlets, to name but a few.
. Adweek
. Business Insider
. Forbes
. Seventeen

In Tim Nudd’s story for Adweek focusing on The Most Viral Ads of 2015, Droga5’s “Friends Furever” spot for Google’s Android is crowned as the most shared ad not just for the year, but in the history of mankind. Having launched 11 months ago, it has now been viewed over 22 million times. Nudd’s sub-head for his story reads, “Animals ruled the ad kingdom, but brands also found a higher purpose.” That insight is illuminated in many of the 20 ads featured in his story. To me, this line is also fascinating: “Total sharing of the top 20 ads is up almost 40 percent compared to 2014, with 40.2 million shares compared to 29 million last year.”

As featured in Business Insider by Jillian D’Onfro, there’s even a #YouTubeRewind video about 2015’s most viral videos, and a Behind-the-Scenes video for that. Combined, since Dec. 9, those videos have tallied over 85 million views themselves.

Meanwhile, the Forbes and Seventeen stories reported on the biggest “trending” videos of 2015, which were determined based on views, shares, comments, and likes. Megan Friedman writes for Seventeen: “The top video, featuring kid dancer Heaven King, has 115 million views and counting. It’s the first time that a dance video has been the most popular of the year, and it’s likely not the last, since its closest competition only got 83 million views.”

Experts continue to point out that strong creative ideas are the key ingredients in videos that go viral. As we look for ways to bring the world (or at least, our target audiences) together, what will we think of next?