Digital Storytelling and YouTube

As a student of film & digital media and administator of an online filmmaking website, the subject of HASTAC's upcoming forum caught my interest.  I'm not very familiar with the programs this forum is based around, but as an amateur digital filmmaker I have some perspective on the idea of digital storytelling.

When YouTube first began to catch on, I was not too excited by it.  The image quality of video uploads to the site was poor, and I initially felt that I'd rather have people not see my videos at all than see them in this format.

Another problem I found with YouTube is that many of the most popular YouTubers were not necessarily some of the best.  The wild popularity of Fred over the last year and a half is evidence of this, but especially in the field of animation on YouTube, short, funny, and stupid tends to win out.

As other stop motion animators had success on YouTube and I got an increasing number of requests from viewers to put my videos on YouTube (until then I only made them available as downloadable videos on my website) I eventually broke down and decided to start a YouTube channel.

The video quality was poor as recently as December 2007 when I started my channel, but it did provide an easy way for people to see my work and, now, YouTube accounts for the vast majority of my viewers.  The site has since introduced HD video and a number of other useful features.  My shortest, funniest, and dumbest videos (such as "Cashman") are still the most popular but it does provide an easy way to get all my videos some exposure.  And lately I've begun to collect some advertisement revenue, which doesn't hurt, either.

What makes a video become virally, wildly popular, though?  It seems to be a combination of luck and making something memorable that at least some of the viewers will find entertaining enough to pass along.  I never set out to sell out for YouTube popularity, but I have begun to plan a web series with a group of animators from around the world.  The plan is to create a funny, silly series that will have a new episode each week for a season of 14 episodes.  I'm still in the process of writing it, but based on the example of successful YouTube ventures we're planning out a series of promotional videos leading up to the launch of the series in order to maximize the impact.  It's difficult to *force* a video to go viral, though if you don't mind using questionable tactics you can come close.