Epic Fail – Wishin’ and Hopin’ and Prayin’ for a Viral Video

Turns out you can’t manufacture a viral video.

Well, I mean, you absolutely can make a viral video but you can’t make it a viral video.

The other day, I threw out a hypothesis that I could turn a simple video into a viral video by simply asking my readers and the video’s viewers to Digg, Stumble, Reddit, Tweet, Facebook, email, and blog the video. Seems simple enough, right?

Turns out, asking your readers and viewers to do this stuff does have an effect: the video ended up getting about 5 times as many views as most of my other videos. The problem was, that still ended up being only 150 views, far less than the 5,000 or whatever that I wanted.

(As a side note – yes, I realize 5,000 views does not constitute a viral video. However, for me, that would have blown my mind.)

So, what’s the moral of the story?

I think I proved my point that you get a lot further by telling your readers and viewers what you want from them as opposed to beating around the bush. However, as has been stated many times before, you can’t make a video become viral, it just sort of has to happen.

What are your thoughts? Post your comments below.