YouTube's Trend Manager reveals the 4 reasons videos go viral:

I don't concern myself with huge number of views or going viral. I am more about making money so I go for quantity.

Once the videos are set up, they help me get ranking and indirectly, sales.

On some items, they are direct sales. I make a few bucks every day from them and it adds up.

Absolutely correct. REAL viral videos go viral all on their own, based on a simple principle - after someone watches it, they have the burning desire to send it to someone else.

Good observation, and in fact we really should not be looking to go viral at all, but instead targeting your audience with specific information.

Here is a secret about those videos going "viral". Almost ALL of them have massive marketing budgets to reach the masses, including some very GREY, and some would argue black-hat tactics. I honestly cannot remember the last time I (socially) shared a "commercial", regardless of how good I thought it was. I also bet most people would sooner share a funny dog video than a clever advertisement.

Now those commercials might be good, even very good at what they do, but they are not necessarily (likely not) viral because they have a lot of views. Here is the test of a viral video > Could you stop it if you wanted to? You see, spreading virally lends itself to being uncontrolled. The true viral videos have other copies, duplicate uploads, parodies, blog uploads, news reports, documented arguments/discussions etc, etc.. If any of those companies you mentioned actually removes one of those commercials, then poof!! It's gone. Because it was a paid campaign, such as the one described here >

The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos | TechCrunch

Listen.... viral schmiral. It's a waste of time for IMers to try and come up with a viral video because they are terribly difficult to target for your niche (audience too general), and what you think is going to go viral is going to be wrong, wrong, wrong, virtually every time. You will just never know.

I made such a comparison before, but it's worth being repeated here. Would you rather have A) one viral video with 1,000,000 views OR B) 25 niche targeted videos with between 250 and 10,000 views each?

Myself, I can build a full time business from the B) strategy. With A) you will get a few bucks in adsense over the course of a few months. Keeping in mind you may have to make a few hundred videos, or even more, before one does go viral.

Further to this, recently an episode of The Pitch on AMCTV (PopChips) featured an advertising agency claiming "We will create the world's most successful viral video ever" and won the contract (at least partly) based on such a claim. I LOL'd when I heard them say that.

I checked around and yes they do have a channel now, but nothing remotely anywhere near viral, never mind the most successful ever. Most of the videos that were submitted for their campaign have just a handful of views. In fact, they resorted to hiring Ashten Kutcher to do some humorous Youtube skits for the them.

So if these professional marketers don't even understand what is "viral", after making such a claim on national TV, then you gotta know it's a tough nut to crack, even if you could justify trying.

Leave the viral video attempts for your partner channel, where you are looking to create a full time income from ad revenue. Otherwise, just concentrate on offering real "niche" value to your viewers using video.

Yes, and a decent amount.

Youtube updated their formula and most of the replies are no longer being shown on popular videos.

Although I think it's back now. I just use hootesuite to use youtube so I have no idea what's going on youtube these days.

Most of the reply girls get a few thousand views per video still, and have multiple channels. They get about $5-10 per video based on the views they get, and obv varies based on clicks as well. But since they make 10-20 videos a day while talking for 2 hours during that duration, the money adds up pretty fast.