How do successful viral videos like the dramatic prairie dog, Nyan cat, and OK GO do it? Learn how to make a viral video with a free report from Videomaker Magazine, How to Make a Viral Video: 11 Tips to Create a YouTube Sensation.

Every videographer dreams that their work will go viral, that they will shoot something that so speaks to people that it spreads like wildfire over the Internet. It’s a great way to bring attention to your business or show off your video-creating talents. And while it’s impossible to predict what will go viral, there are certain things that you can include in your videos to increase the odds that you’ll have a smash Internet hit on your hands.

A viral video is any video that becomes popular by being passed from person to person via the web. Marketers, entertainers, and videographers spend a lot of time trying to create videos calculated to “go viral” sometimes with great success.  They can be anything from remixes of poorly translated video games like “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” to funny clips from the news like “Boom Goes the Dynamite,” but they can garner thousands (or even hundred of thousands) of views!

How to Make a Viral Video: 11 Tips to Create a YouTube Sensation is the free report from Videomaker that will show you how to do it. It includes 11 proven tips for increasing the likelihood that your video will go viral. Learn the reasons behind the popularity of some of today’s hottest videos and how you can use the same ideas to catapult your own way to video stardom. There’s no telling what videos will take the Internet like wildfire, but we’ll show you some easy ways to better your chances of success.

Download your free report, How to Make a Viral Video:11 Tips to Create a YouTube Sensation.

How to Make a Viral Video? Make a Cute Cat Video

Having a successful YouTube viral video is the dream of nearly every person who hits the upload button, but the fact of the matter is you might have a better chance of getting hit by the proverbial lightening bolt than having a successful viral video. (Remind me to tell you my lightening bolt story later.)

According to Most Watched Today, viral cat videos are one of the biggest group of videos people watch and share, as this “Catvertising“  commercial spoof tries to illustrate – as well as Kittywood, a spoof on a Hollywood-type production company that only makes cat videos.

Viral videos today are what catchy jingles and slogans were pre-internet. Remember “Where’s the Beef”? How about “Got Milk?” or “Don’t Leave Home Without It”. These particular slogans were so popular that they took on a life of their own and are still parodied today. Read the rest of this entry »

We all knew it was coming. Ever since Google bought YouTube back in 2006, there’s been constant talk that Google may some day launch it’s own premium original programming on the popular video uploading site. As expected, Google announced in October that it planned on investing over 100 million dollars (that’s right, 100 with six zeroes after it) in order to get quality original content. During that time they also leaked a few of the big celebrity names that had signed on to the project such as Ashton Kutcher, Shaquille O’Neal, Tony Hawk, Jay-Z, and Madonna. There was no talk about the format behind each of these videos but given the names of some of the producers that they listed, you can be sure that they’ll be specific channels on music, movies, and sports – which all happen to be some of the hardest mediums to break into.

Shortly thereafter, YouTube also unveiled their movie and television streaming service which means that not only will YouTube be serving up videos of people’s crazy antics around the world, it will be serving up content from established entertainment providers and from their own user-created library as well. If all of this works out for Google, they will not only be the largest online repository of user-created and established entertainment company videos.  That may make them a force to be feared in the video world.

The reasoning behind this move is a desire for Google to get people to stay on their site longer (for advertising purposes) as well as being a vehicle for instant niche content which Google feels it’s uniquely suited to do. This niche market idea will also have the benefit of giving advertisers a more targeted audience to reach for less money than it would take to do a more generic campaign. In addition, the people and companies that Google is in the process of recruiting will be able to share in part of the ad revenues giving them a real incentive to make sure quality content is always available on the site.

Google plans on grabbing a big cut of the $300 billion television industry with this idea and with all of the cash and human resource reserves they have, they could very well make that desire into a reality. This means that if Google succeeds, we may end up seeing a day where we no longer give our edited video content to cable channels, but to YouTube instead.

A thriller of a different flavor, “Inside Experience” offers social media participants to help move the plot of the story and decide the outcome of events. “Inside,” starring Emmy Rosseum, is an online thriller funded by Toshiba and Intel that debuted July 25th.

Have you ever wanted to get inside the head of a filmmaker or look behind the scenes as a movie unfolds? Have you ever wanted to decide a movie’s plot or a character’s fate while watching that movie develop? Here’s your chance to participate in a fully immersive movie experience.

Rosseum plays “Christina Perasso,” a young woman whose life takes a turn when she leaves a Seattle coffee shop and ends up in an unknown room with no outside contact. She has no idea how she got in this room – or why – but when she discovers her kidnappers left her a Toshiba Satellite P775 laptop, powered by an Intel second generation chip, she sets up Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other accounts and starts trying to reach the outside.

Directed by D.J. Caruso, the laptop is a perfect idea as a tool for Rosseum’s character because it can also serve as her social media webcam, she uses it to show her viewers her surroundings and to also find clues and ask viewers to assist her to unravel these puzzles, in hopes of finding out more about her capture, surroundings, and (hopefully!) eventual escape.

Caruso says, “We wanted to make this an addictive experience for the viewer, … whether they’re watching the film segments or participating in the social media segments, the whole experience makes an entirely different film, so viewers or participants can help steer the film in a different direction.

Social Media Director Ben Tricklebank says, “it takes a traditional storytelling narrative, but tries to allow it to unfold through social media… and creating a story through those platforms.” Caruso adds, “it’s a little bit unnerving, but I mean that in an exciting way as a filmmaker.”

Fans can participate in several ways, through the site’s own blog, through the project’s Facebook page or through Twitter, by following @theinsideexp and the hashtag #theinsideexperience

Fans can post clues, offer poor Christina advice and support and some clues and ideas will be worked into the series episodes.

Definitely a different kind of thriller – one in which the viewer isn’t a passive watcher but an interactive participant. The new wave of movie going future or not, it’s a cool concept and – warning! Very addictive!

Last night Videomaker friends, family, staffers and alumni gathered for a festive event to celebrate 25 year’s of publishing tips, techniques and tutorials on making video – and we streamed it live to a worldwide audience.

When Matt and Patrice York first launched Videomaker magazine, there was no other publication like it that was targeted to the consumer video enthusiast. A few magazines existed for the professional producers, but nothing for the home video market. Matt’s vision was to create a warm, friendly environment where people interested in taking their home videos to a higher level by using better techniques and creative composition could ‘drop in’, ask questions, and not feel intimidated by the technology or snubbed by the elitists in the pro world.

Back then, video cameras were incredibly clunky, some still separated the camera from the recorder deck, and they were called “affordable video cameras for the consumer” for “only” $2,500 -  quite a bit of cash in the 1980s economy!

If you desired to edit your video – good luck! You had to have two VTRs, one to play your video out, the other to record your video to, and each time you dubbed footage down you had what they called ‘generational loss’, which was pretty bad in many cases because the original footage had poor quality to begin with, no real colors, poor contrast, and a complete loss of details in low light.

Then there was the problem of distribution. Once you had your footage shot and reasonably edited, you had to deliver it to your audience somehow, which usually meant dubbing it once again to a VHS tape and mailing it or hand-delivering it to someone.

Now everyone can upload their video to any number of free internet sites like YouTube and Vimeo, and anyone can stream their footage – live – via many sources and the quality is pretty good. Back in 1986, when Matt and Patrice launched Videomaker, only Broadcast TV stations had that ability, now we’re all broadcasters in our own right. And, believe it or not, we have Matt York and Videomaker to thank for some of the changes in the market through Matt’s personal contact with the manufacturers of the products you use and his battle at many levels to make video making no longer an elitist game, but an Every Person game. Congratulations, Videomaker, for 25 years. I’m glad to have been part of that history.

Happy 25th Anniversary, Videomaker!

To help us celebrate 25 years of teaching video techniques, we created a forums page called “How Videomaker Helped Me”.  This link takes you to our 25th Anniversary “Letters to the Editors” page with comments and congratulations and you can read more or to add celebratory comments on our forums page.

Well, this comes at no surprise. Google just announced that it will be shutting down it’s completely forgotten Google Video service as of April 29th.

Going back in time, Google Video was the search giant’s answer to YouTube back in 2005 when the video hosting market was still seemed up for grabs. Not long after that (and with a majority of videos still on YouTube), Google decided to raise the white flag and simply buy the video hosting site for $1.6 billion instead. Since then, the service has been slowly going the way of the dinosaurs. In fact, users haven’t even been able to upload videos to the site since May 2009, but existing videos kept the service barely alive until now.

Google has suggested that its users move their videos over to YouTube if they haven’t done so already. Otherwise those videos will suffer the same fate as the search giant’s video site and be gone forever.