Anatomy of a Viral Video

On March 5, 2012, the KONY 2012 video was uploaded by Invisible Children, Inc. on their YouTube channel. The rest is history. A week after the video was uploaded the video has over 75 million views and all the experts who claimed you cannot "create" a viral video have been proved horribly wrong. The video descriptions states that:

"KONY 2012 is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice."

and contains a clear call to action for the World Wide community. Whether you agree this strategy is the best way to approach the issue, or even that the issue has been framed in a misleading way, as the critics of Invisible Children claim, one has to give props to the company for an impressive use of social media to propagate a cause. This post does not go into the "how" of how it was done, but rather captures a snapshot of the aftermath to look at the results as shown in the YouTube statistics of the video.

 First view from a mobile device: 28,105,070
 First embedded on – facebook.com: 10,406,480
 First referral from – facebook.com: 8,238,356
 First referral from YouTube search – kony 2012: 6,684,068
 First referral from a subscriber module: 2,494,282
 First referral from YouTube search – kony: 1,782,616
 First referral from – twitter.com: 1,268,580

A few key points stand out:

 More than 28 million views came from mobile devices pointing out how important they have become in this type of phenomena.

The reach of the video was World wide including China and most of Africa.

Facebook contributed either directly or indirectly to over 18 million views

Youtube search for "kony" contributed over 1.75 million views

The subscriber module contributed close to 2.5 million views pointing out how much it helps to have a solid subscriber base. The "invisiblechildreninc" YouTube channel has over 250,000 subscribers.

Twitter, while probably very significant in the viral nature of the video, only contributed slightly over 1.25 million views.

Hopefully over time there will be academic studies that clearly and analytically identify the key steps that allowed social media to be so effective in spreading the KONY 2012 video.

Previous post: http://www.webseriestoday.com/2012/03/kony-2012.html

Kony 2012 on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kony_2012

Invisible Children, Inc. on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Children,_Inc.