The Opposite of Viral Video

I wanted some bad video. The opposite of viral video.

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

Turns out it’s very, very difficult to find bad video on YouTube.

I was looking for a kids’ dance recital. I searched and scrolled through pages and pages of “recitals” and most had thousands and thousands of views– still way too good for my purposes.  I narrowed it to “dance recital”, then ranked by views.  Scrolled down for 10 minutes. And down. And down. 1000 videos down out of 8,560– and the view count was over 6,000 views still.  I finally found some really awful video by trying different key words until “kid dance recital” at last yielded the seriously low-count stuff. This photo is from a static shot that goes on forever– and still had 700 views.

YouTube’s job is to get views for advertisers.  They pay their best creators in order to get views for their adverstisers. So pros and near pros dominate the system. That’s in YouTube’s interest: 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.

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