Virality. No, we're not talking about Ebola, but about often-watched videos that circulate on YouTube. All across the web there are people making videos in the hope that they'll reach that precious threshold beyond which they've entered the realm of the viral. Does that mean 100,000 views? A million? A billion? Whatever the baseline view number for viral content was, we can guarantee that musician Psy just broke it by shattering – literally, shattering – YouTube's view counter.
One Large Step For Webkind
If you live on Earth and cruise the web, chances are you've seen this video. It's PSY's "Gangnam Style," the music video that gave new significance to viral content. Though it came out in 2012, it made headlines again just the other day for achieving a truly impressive feat: Breaking YouTube. Well, more specifically, the site's view counter, but still.
As of December 4, if you go to the video and put your cursor over the view count, you'll see that the numbers start spinning freely in some crazy jumble. This is YouTube's public declaration that, Yeah, this video has so many views that we legit can't count anymore. In a Google Plus post on Monday, the company stated, "We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met PSY."
Because it has attained a number of views that YouTube once considered impossible, PSY's video is single-handedly leading the site to expand its view count integer to encompass 64 bits, which means that in the near future YouTube will be able to record more than 9.2 billion views. So what does PSY have to say about all of this? Apart from tweeting a link to YouTube's Google Plus post and re-tweeting a few congratulatory tweets, nothing, which tells us that he must be a pretty humble dude.
For PSY's part, he's hardly just a one-hit wonder. While none of his other videos have shattered the view count (yet), he has experienced major success with vids like "Gentleman" (the "Gangnam" follow-up with 763 million views and counting) and a recent collaboration with Snoop Dog (162 million views so far). With PSY's viral success on the table, we had one question: Exactly how much money is there in viral content?
Can Viral Content Lead To Cash?
If viral videos are such a desirable thing to make, then they must be earning their creators big bucks, right? Not exactly. Sure, PSY is rich beyond belief, but most of that money didn't come from clicks on his video. As a Forbes piece pointed out, his earnings from ads on his YouTube channel have netted him only around $2 million – a hefty number to be sure, but that's for a channel with billions of views. For the "average" viral vid person out there – let's say someone with a few hundred thousand views – the ad money isn't going to be much at all. Content creator Mike Vogel, for instance, had a video which received 654,341 views. His earnings on that? Around $36. Some nice pocket change, for sure, but nothing to live off of.
In order to truly monetize virality, you have to find a way to parlay it into something marketable. For PSY, the marketability factor came easily when his song turned him into an international pop star. But the market for major pop stars is a pretty crowded one (isn't it always?), so it may be worth looking for other means of turning a popular video into cold, hard cash.
