What I'm Loving

One of my goals is to attend a Ted Talk...I really mean it. They have collections of the funniest talks (Ted Laughs) on Netflix and I watch them constantly. This week I watched one in particular I found very funny. It was about the trends manager of Youtube, who "professionally watch youtube videos."

He says there are three steps for a video to become viral:

1. Tastemakers

2. Communities of participators 

3. Unexpectedness

A tastemaker would be a person people look up to, the example he gives is when Jimmy Kimmel tweeted about the video Double Rainbow. A community of participators is the people who join together to love a video, or make fun of it (like Friday, by Rebecca Black).  

All the spikes on the graph are Fridays, he points out. The reason it began picking up was Tosh.0 talked about it and formed community participation; a society dedicated to making fun of Rebecca Black. With other forms of entertainment, there is only one party benefiting--the viewers. But with the internet now people can participate, make response videos, or even parodies.Unexpectedness is that moment where a not-so-funny video becomes hilarious because of one quick occurrence that was completely unexpected. 

This was interesting because I've never really thought about what makes something famous, or how the viewers are the ones who decide whether or not the videos are good. It's personal and it's completely dependent on us.