Why do videos go viral?

Why do videos go viral?

It is the held belief that something unexpected in a video has the potential to make it viral. 

But before it goes viral it needs to be picked up by ‘trendmakers’ people who themselves have a huge social media following.

And finally we need a community of engaged participants to agree with the trendmakers and share the video through social media until it hits that 1million views.

There is a huge potential here for human collaboration on the scale of the ‘captcha’,  the challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a human being. But also it is being utilised to translate millions of books on a mass scale for free by us every time we spend 6 seconds filling one in we translate a word in a book somewhere in the world. It’s not unexpected because the user has to do it to proceed to the next page but is utilises this mass engaged community on the web to do something useful. 

I believe viral video’s have the potential of this when the right Idea goes viral.