Viral Videos: Entertainment for the Lowest Common Denominator
TOTALLY JUST KIDDING! Kinda.
Within the web series world, there's always some debate over going 'viral.' There's confusion on what technically constitutes a viral video, For instance.
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And creators are often warned not to covet this illusive status for their shows. Naysayers caution that only 'cat videos' go viral. Some even claim that web series aren't worth producing, on the grounds that they have very little hope of really exploding online. Content needs tens of millions of views in order to be worthwhile creatively, these people say.
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This is NOT a viral video! WATCH IT NOW!
But by those standards, almost every sitcom ever produced does not qualify as 'viral.' Consider that "Two and a Half Men", it its prime, drew around 15 million viewers a week, tops. Four times that amount of people watched a talking dog woof 'I love you' last week. Maybe they should have brought that dog on board instead of Ashton Kutcher.
At "Home at Last" we think it's more important for content creators to focus on building an audience (of any size). Inherently, anything with a true, dedicated audience can't really 'go viral,' because these videos, just like actual biological viruses, are only temporary. And there's always a new, more annoying strain, every time you turn around. And ultimately, even though viruses of all types can feel all-consuming for a few days at a time, they're forgettable.
To further the comparison to actual viruses, consider this: Just like only evil mad scientists attempt to manufacture a biological virus, only weirdos and maladjusted Napoleon's try to manufacture viral online content. Viruses by their very nature are difficult to cultivate. They're constantly changing and adapting. They're impossible to predict, and therefore nearly impossible to deliberately spawn.
That said, it's genuinely depressing how many millions of hours lonely ladies have spent filming their cats, hoping to strike it big on the Internet. If the popular obsession with viral videos continues to grow at its current rate, in thirty years society will have collapsed entirely. The cats will rule us all.
Tangent aside, what we really want to say in this blog post is this: If any body has a video camera we can borrow, I swear to god we trained our cat to burp the alphabet. Let's do this thing.
- Matt & Chelsea
At "Home at Last" we think it's more important for content creators to focus on building an audience (of any size). Inherently, anything with a true, dedicated audience can't really 'go viral,' because these videos, just like actual biological viruses, are only temporary. And there's always a new, more annoying strain, every time you turn around. And ultimately, even though viruses of all types can feel all-consuming for a few days at a time, they're forgettable.
To further the comparison to actual viruses, consider this: Just like only evil mad scientists attempt to manufacture a biological virus, only weirdos and maladjusted Napoleon's try to manufacture viral online content. Viruses by their very nature are difficult to cultivate. They're constantly changing and adapting. They're impossible to predict, and therefore nearly impossible to deliberately spawn.
That said, it's genuinely depressing how many millions of hours lonely ladies have spent filming their cats, hoping to strike it big on the Internet. If the popular obsession with viral videos continues to grow at its current rate, in thirty years society will have collapsed entirely. The cats will rule us all.
Tangent aside, what we really want to say in this blog post is this: If any body has a video camera we can borrow, I swear to god we trained our cat to burp the alphabet. Let's do this thing.
- Matt & Chelsea