The Opposite of Viral Video

I wanted some bad video.

Not to watch, at least not all the way through, but to use as an example of how not to do things for my book.  Some inspiration from a video that was truly awful.

Turns out it’s very, very difficult to find bad video on YouTube.  I scrolled through 40 pages of “recitals” and none had less than 1600 view– still way too good for my purposes.  I searched for “dance recital”, then ranked by views.  YouTube cut me off on page 50– 1000 videos down out of 8,560– and the view count was over 2,000 still.  I finally found some really awful stuff by trying different key words until “kid dance recital” at last yielded the seriously low-count stuff.

YouTube’s job is to get views for advertisers.  If viewers watch your bad video, they get fatigued and leave instead of clicking on a “related video” and getting lost in Tube-zone.  To prevent this, the system hides bad video by design.

Anti-viral video. Yet another reason why you don’t want your video to suck.