"Viral" Videos What's Next?

I guess I never really understood Funny or Die or what it really was until last week. Did I know it was a place for funny videos? Yes. But did I know what it’s name really meant? Or that they had their own original work on the site? No. So I was surprised and intrigued when I finally learned that they did make their own content and that many famous people were waiting in line to take part in these funny and soon to be “viral” videos. My personal definition of viral videos has always been: Shot, recorded, or manipulated videos whose maker(s) put their video on the Internet and thought maybe a few thousand people would watch it, but instead it became incredibly popular. So these Funny or Die made “viral” videos are not in my opinion viral videos because they are made with the intent to go viral. These Funny or Die branded “viral” videos are more like short popular mainstream movies that were not advertised by trailers, billboards, reviews, etc but by links, Funny or Die branding, and word of mouth. The fact that some of these “viral” videos were paid for by companies to have their products showcased in them also makes them very un-viral to me and more like full fledged, long, funny advertisements. Do I enjoy them? Yes. But I sometimes wish that they were more spontaneous and not trying to trick me into getting that certain product by displaying it in a funny way. I was amazed at the volume of videos that they were making per month though I was a little disappointed about how more and more of them are being paid for by companies to advertise their products. We do live in a capitalistic time, but many forms of new media die when money becomes the driving force behind them (myspace). So hopefully Funny or Die can tread the line carefully and not become too money driven or it too will become known as an advertising site and may eventually Die like so many of the videos put on it.

I’ve always wondered what the future of new media is. It has seemed to me that in the past few years nothing monumentally new has developed in new media. We’ve seen many types of new media build and strengthen themselves but nothing totally new has emerged and stuck around. We’ve all seen that social networking (Facebook) has grown, online television (Hulu) has expanded, user made video sites (YouTube) have multiplied. But are we all aware of the growing pains new media has had and will those pains turn into even bigger problems down the road? In Hulu you can now pay to have more content, with Youtube you can now be paid depending on how many people watch you video, and companies can now pay sites to make “viral” videos showcasing their products. And one day in the future Facebook will go public, hopefully that goes well. What is next? Modern new media like social networking and user videos have always started off free (well at least the things that survive and grow). But now that there are dollar signs attached to those new types of media who is going to be able to overlook those potential dollar signs to try out something new? Ya we can look to Google and maybe Facebook in the future but where and how are the new Googles and Facebooks going to start out and what is their new media going to be?