YouTube Trends

I recently watched a speech on Ted given by Kevin Allocca. The first line of his biography alone is enough to grab your attention. “Kevin Allocca watches YouTube videos. For his job.” He is the trend manager at YouTube and his speech, titled Why videos go viral, discusses how YouTube sensations come to be.

Allocca begins his speech with an astounding statistic. Over 48 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube every minute. My first thought was probably something close to yours. If that much content is being uploaded, how does anyone stand out?

Allocca makes it simple to understand. He attributes it to three different, and recently new occurrences. The first, are tastemakers, or influencers. These are the people that have a wide variety of followers, and with one tweet can cause a mass of influx to someone’s YouTube post. For example, think Tosh.0 or Jimmy Kimmel.

The second occurrence is linked to communities of participation, or culture. Once the masses become aware of something, they spread the phenomenon even further. They tweet about it and even make their own parodies, in turn, creating viral videos.

But before a video can accomplish any of that, it needs to be unique and unexpected. It wouldn’t matter who the tastemaker for a video was if it was lacking entertainment. Simply said, videos have to stand out in order to go viral.

After listening to Allocca’s speech I began to think about how this trend could be applied to all areas of social media. With so much content, no matter the medium, being added to the web, how is it possible that anyone is able to make a splash? I think these same three occurrences or phenomena could be applied to the Internet as a whole. Let’s look at blogs, for example. According to Web Designer Depot, there are over 100 million active blogs on the Internet. It’s safe to say that in order to have a successful blog you need original content. You also need followers to read your blog and spread the word, so to say. If you have the first two and could get a tastemaker to endorse your blog, the sky would be the limit.

Photo courtesy of: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30311/10-Amazing-Blogs-About-Blogging-to-Start-Reading-NOW.aspx

As our culture continually changes and the public becomes the gatekeepers of information, I think that content will become much more quality driven. Tastemakers will still influence the masses, and the Internet clearly isn’t going anywhere soon, but I believe that the content that drives those trends will begin to improve.