“Going viral” used to be basically random. Someone would take a photo, video, or thought, post it and it would develop a life of its own, get tons of attention, and spread to places the original poster never would have expected. It trended on Twitter, it got on the homepage of Reddit, it got covered on blogs, and maybe, the news even covered it.
Viral moments were mostly lucky breaks. The right person, at the right place at the right time. At most, viral moments were a conspiracy, a handful of people doing something unique that they think would get a lot of attention.
The golden example of this for me is Casey Neistat. Many of his early videos like Bike lanes and iPod’s Dirty Secret were basically “films” made for the internet.
This was a novel concept. There were short films and there were internet videos but there wasn’t a lot to bridge the gap. People made videos for the internet or little clips, but they didn’t make “films,” let alone did they try to make viral videos.
Neistat’s behind the scenes of one of his viral (for the time) videos gives a time capsule of what this used to look like. He was a YouTuber at the top of the platform at the time (2016). His crew was 4 guys. They prepped a bit of gear (including a “truck” with snow tires, but it wasn’t months in the making or huge shoot. This is the most elaborate that things used to be.
Even Neistat himself said this about viral videos in the same video.
You never set out to make a viral video. It’s like you never set out to make a movie that grosses a lot of money. You want to make a great movie. And if it does well in the box office or it gets a lot of views online, that’s fantastic. But you always start from the place of wanting to make a really good movie. Because the virality is wildly out of your control.
Less than 10 years later, this seems terribly quaint, but for many, this was the internet (and social media) we grew up with. The big mistake is treating it like it hasn’t changed.