Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral

Here key figures means people who are interested in your video, have the personality to share videos and are charming enough to have a following that enjoys them (and perhaps includes more key figures).

Also there Virool guys seem to have spend a rather large fraction of their seed finance on the video funny that sells their service :P

Just like email could be used to reach large numbers of people in a short time, spam attempted to destroy it.

Eventually this will devolve into 'video spam' where you'll be bombarded with links to videos in the hope that they will go viral. Fortunately the cost of producing any video is so large that this will dampen the flood but if there are companies that aim specifically for virality of content then that is a sure sign that we're about to see a shift.

Eventually viral videos will die out because too many impulses deaden the nerve and then another useful and nice to have thing will have been murdered. Virality is the mark of excellence of a successful meme, something that should work its own way because you showed it to a small number of people and they decided to reward your work with a reference and so on. Forcing virality by dumping a video in front of a large number of people will simulate the effects of virality by using a starting group large enough that the eventual effect will be indistinguishable from virality.

But it is not the same as virality. A viral campaign costs outside of the original production costs next to nothing and is proof you got it right. If you have to force virality you are actually saying that your video is not all that good.

So users of services like these should realize that they are essentially admitting their content is not the real thing.

So when you talk to journalists you never know what part of whole conversation they will highlight:) I am not a fan of this example too, i dont think it represents well what are we doing as a company, but a lot of them catch this since it corresponds with our catchy name.

the idea of our service is simply to get relevant videos in front the right audiences. as someone below correctly commented its essentially AdSense for Videos. since we dont have fixed ad units but rather offer API to developers its up to them how obtrusive/native they want to place it. so far we have seen both very abusive and very nice implementations when video was nicely integrated in some games natively.