Viral Video ~ the YouTube Way

I just finished reading an Internet Retailer article on Viral Video.

Well… it was not really on viral video — it was really on the number of sales a small company made of a DVD as a result of a YouTube video.

In 1998, the Indiana University Capella group "Straight No Chaser"  had a performance of them singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas".

The video found it’s way onto YouTube in 2006 — and like most of the millions of videos posted at YouTube, not much came out of it….

…at least not much until a year later.

In November of last year, 2007 — the video started to receive quite a few views.

The video was receiving over 400,000 views per day!

From what I have read — the video was not placed on YouTube as an advertisement to sell the video. It was placed there for entertainment purposes only.

But people wanted to buy a copy of the performance — it was that good.

Since there was not a link to a site where they could purchase a copy of the video - they resorted to the search engines to find where they could get it (there is a link now).

A small company based in Southwest Harbor, ME — A-cappella.com sold copies of the DVD from their web site.

A-cappella.com has two full time employees and averaged 60 sales a day. That was the average before orders of "Straight No Chaser" started pouring in.

The company quickly sold out of the 30 DVD’s it had on hand… and by the time it was all said and done, they have sold over 5300 copies of the DVD.

This is a great example of viral video.

It is one of those cases where someone watched the video on YouTube… they sent the link to their friends… those friends sent it to other friends and the rest is history.

Here is the YouTube video of the performance;

 

Here’s a kicker… the YouTube video and DVD almost never happened.

The company that did the video went out of business shortly after filming the performance — no one ever saw the recording at first.

To make a long story short, one of the original members of "Straight No Chaser" contacted the past owner and he still had tapes of the performance… and as they say, the rest is history.

So the obvious question is this.

Can you create a video of something you do?

It does not matter the kind of business you are in — it could be anything - it could even be a hobby as long as it is something people want to watch or learn.

Would the traffic to your site help your business?

I almost forgot… by February of this year, the YouTube video of "Straight No Chaser" — over 7.4 million views!

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