A still from the short video "Lazy Sunday" showing Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg.
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But most viral videos come from amateurs, brilliant or lucky camcorder auteurs who just put their work on the Net and watch it take off. Traffic to viral-video sites is surging, driven by ubiquitous broadband Internet access and cheap, easy-to-use digital video cameras. Since last year, visits to Yahoo!'s Video section have gone up 148%. Traffic to iFilm.com grew 102%. YouTube, launched in December, is storming the Web. It already had 9 million unique visitors in February, compared with Google Video's 6.2 million and Yahoo!'s 3.8 million. YouTube's traffic grew another 24% just last month, and the site shows more than 40 million videos a day. Visitors to YouTube spend an average of 15 minutes there per session--that's an eternity in the quick-clicking world of the Web. Seriously. Don't go to YouTube if you don't have some time to kill, because whatever time you have, YouTube will kill it.
Viral videos are powerful, but that power can be a little scary. Once something goes viral, there's no way to get the genie back in the bottle, and some things go viral that shouldn't. One notorious surveillance video, still at large online, shows a suspect in a San Bernardino County, Calif., police station shooting himself in the head with a pistol. Another video shows a chubby kid waving a golf-ball retriever like a light saber. The kid, Ghyslain Raza, was 15 at the time. Three of his classmates found the footage and put it online, and it became an instant Internet classic. Soon strangers started making fun of Raza on the street. The San Francisco Giants put the video on their Jumbotron. Raza, now 18, became known as the Star Wars Kid. He also became depressed and dropped out of school. Eventually he sued the classmates who had found the video. Two weeks ago, they settled for an undisclosed sum.
Corporations are running into similar problems. They want to ride the viral train for the free publicity, but it doesn't always go where they want it to. In March Chevrolet organized an online make-your-own-commercial campaign for its Tahoe SUV. Green-minded humorists hijacked the campaign, creating widely circulated Tahoe ads with slogans like, "Nature? It'll grow back. Drive a car that costs the earth." Last year, Lee Ford and Dan Brooks, a London-based creative ad development team, came up with an "edgy" Volkswagen spot for a demo reel: a terrorist tries to detonate a car bomb outside a crowded café. But the car, a VW Polo, is too sturdy--it contains the blast, killing the terrorist but saving the café. Shot on a shoestring budget, the clip is shocking, tasteless, stunningly effective--and totally unauthorized. When it leaked onto the Net (it had been hidden on Ford and Brooks' website), they were pretty stunned too. "We went to sleep, and then America got it," says Ford, 33. "I woke in the morning and looked at our website. The hit rate was through the roof." The duo had to apologize to Volkswagen.