Top 10 Viral – or how I spent my time on garbage.

While browsing across some Digg articles, I can across a particular one that indicates the Top 10 Viral videos on the web as pointed by BBC. After browsing these videos, all I could think was: how much time have we spent watching this type of garbage?
Honestly, it became revolting for me to see how virality, a tool that marketers on the online world so actively try to crack, can be reduced to a bunch of movies that focus majorly on sex or idiocy. Ok, one or two focus slightly on spoofing which is a semi-interesting way to show how people interact with certain contents, but it gets lost on the idiotic content of the video itself.
This made me think on two things:

- For the info-excluded audience that still dreads the online world, it displays an hall of fame that depicts it as somewhat degrading…
- For the brands, it makes us think – is virality such an important thing to fight for? I mean, if you want to be viral just mash up a Family Guy episode with some raunchy porn site.

My conclusion is simple – virality isn’t resumed to these Top 10 Videos. In fact, these Top 10 Videos represent on virality what the top 10 CD sales represent for music – the mainstream and popular no-brainer side. It does not represent the subtle nature of virality as we can see in examples as the Sony Bravia’s advertisements. We will approach this in an upcoming article dedicated to virality 101. But for now, check the Top 10 and enjoy wasting a few minutes of your time not stimulating your brain in any way possible.