Wednesday, December 29, 2010

We Wish You a Viral Christmas

If there is a good way to track the most viral videos on YouTube, I have not yet found it.  I can understand why it is not easy, because there are usual multiple postings of the ones that are “seriously viral.”  Still it is probably appropriate to the season that the “Christmas 2.0” version of the Nativity has amassed 8,236,455 as of this writing, which makes for a significant lead over the 5,684,959 views (which appears to be a cumulative figure across eight separate postings) for “Animals of YouTube sing ‘Deck the Halls.’"  It is also worth observing that the animal video first appeared a year ago on December 23, 2009 but never made it to the 1,000,000 mark during that holiday season, while “Christmas 2.0” is a product of the current season and appears to have originated in Portugal.  The Portuguese version, which was posted on December 6, has 2,746,907 views of its own;  so, if we aggregate across languages, the full count has broken 10,000,000 and is probably running with twice as much popularity as the animals.

I suppose the curmudgeonly response would be to ask whether or not people have better things to do.  Consider, however, that economic times have not improved very much over this past year.  There is certainly more of the Christmas spirit in watching “Christmas 2.0” (perhaps even as a family experience) than there would be in going to the mall to figure out how you are going to buy gifts with money you don’t have!

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