Category:Viral Factory Videos

From FamousPictures

The Viral Factory is an advertising agency that has made several highly popular viral videos for various companies. Based in the UK and the US they specialize in creating video and then tracking them as they spread around the world. Matt Smith the co-founder and owner of The Viral Factory describes the company strategy like this:

"We make viral films that have global reach. That means that people worldwide enjoy and pass on the marketing material. Our virals create a buzz that spills over into the offline world, generating a huge PR value for clients.

The main benefit of viral campaigning is that your message can reach spaces that are uncluttered by other advertising messages, like millions of office workers who can enjoy a quick entertainment fix. The idea is to turn a single visitor into 5 visitors, and then turn each of these 5 visitors into 25 visitors. Keep doing that and the numbers soon add up."^[1]

1 Company History
- 1.1 Enter Ed Robinson
2 Top Ten Viral Videos
3 Sources

Company History

Mike Smith while working at, The Guardian Newspaper, began a collection of viral videos on his high speed office computer. He soon became known for the collection and became that, Viral Video guy who had all the videos and could send them on request.

Even after changing jobs he would still get tons of emails asking for this or that video. He eventuall had enough and created punchbaby.com and uploaded all the videos so that people could browse through and find what they wanted. PunchBaby is still one of the biggest viral-video sites on the Web and after following some advice from a marketing friend he branded the site.

Enter Ed Robinson

Mike soon had the idea to create his own videos but his efforts fell short as he his Video production skills were lacking, enter Ed Robinson. Ed was a yound director anxious to prove his talents. Trying to expand his profile and get some more work he created a small video, called Headrush. He posted online in hopes that someone would see it. With in days it spread around the world.

Mike upon seeing Headrush uploaded to his site got in touch with Robinson, as ‘the viral guy’ from punchbaby, and explained: "Here’s what’s going on, this is why it’s going nuts, and by the way I think we should start a business"^[2]. In 2001 Viral Videos was born.

Top Ten Viral Videos

In Nov of 2006 they where commissioned to do a study where they calculated the top 10 viral videos. UKTV G2's where they ones who paid for the study in celebration of their new series, Totally Viral, which began on Monday Nov the 27th, 2006. The Viral Factory was able to determine the amount of views by collating page impression figures from websites such as YouTube and Google Videos. Through this method they where able to determine the top 10 videos measured in millions of page impressions are:^[3]

1. Star Wars Kid (900m)
2. Numa Numa (700m)
3. One Night In Paris (400m)
4. Kylie Minogue for Agent Provocateur (360m)
5. The Exploding Whale (350m)
=6. John West Salmon Bear Fight (300m)
=6. Trojan Games (300m)
8. Kolla2001 (200m)
9. AfroNinja (80m)
10. The Shining Redux (50m)