As someone said in the comments, they really don't make (promote) videos like this any more.
It's just a beautiful video, someone performed something on stage, the crowd clearly loved it. It required real talent, and wasn't just done to get Youtube views in a weekly/daily video posts trying only to drive engagement.
A shame that Youtube's best days are long behind it. Yes the beast is bigger than ever and has so many more people, but it's not quality rising to the top.
The thing is, you absolutely can still find stuff like that. The trick is to search for stuff you like, and train YouTube's algorithm to find more stuff like it. I've got mine trained enough that my feed mostly consists of stuff I actually do want to watch.
Some of it is from "content creators," yes (although nothing from the well-known ones), but a lot of it is just random things I happen to have an interest in.
Okay, that said, YouTube's default feed can suck my hairy scrote. It's astoundingly bad.
Well therein lies the problem. I don't know what to search for.
And when I do think of something, most of the time I'll get maybe 4 or 5 results for semi-related content that I'm not interested in, and then the remaining results are completely unrelated crap that the algorithm thinks I want to watch. I've heard that over 700,000 hours worth of video are uploaded every single day, but apparently I'm not allowed to actually search for them.
I think you're missing what I'm bemoaning. It's not "Youtube doesn't work". It's "Good viral content no longer exists" When this video or Charlie bit my finger got popular it got popular OUTSIDE of people who were searching for it. People got exposure to something unique fresh and new that wasn't something they always clicked on.
Now it feels like everyone is in their little echo chamber in youtube, which is great, I get to see SBNation, NumberPhile, Tom Scott, and Your Movie Sucks... and don't see Mr. Beast or PewdiePie, because that's what I choose to view.
But nothing spreads "Virally" any more because youtube feels like they locked down what people see to what they 100 percent know people want to see with no chance.
A bigger different problem with this is what happens on twitter and sites like that, where it reinforces bad mentalities. If you only look at alt-right or progressive videos, you start to ONLY see those, and you aren't getting a wealth of different opinion, you basically get a singular view of the world, because that's what you want to see. It'd be fine, but people start to think "What I see on social media is representative of the entire world." And that's the first step on a bad path.
That's the thing, it's not viral if it's personalized. "Viral" expands far outside of the niche. You might not like videos of baby or slice of life videos, but Charlie bit my finger was everywhere. Almost no one wanted Rick Astley, but everyone saw it. Even this, I don't look up dance videos, but I Watched this whole thing. That's where "Viral" is.. The "this is popular even without being a fan of it."
Now it seems the only videos that do that is shitty drama or clickbait crap.
For me the old dance video I couldn't get enough of back in the day was of these dudes doing the robot at Kollaboration 2001 that capped off with this dude doing some sick liquified robot shit that still melts my mind to this day. Thought this was that video initially so had to go look it up for you folks.
Ah thank you so much for linking that, every time I see that evolution of dance video come up it reminds me of the kollaboration one and I kept forgetting the name for years.
Speaking of old dance videos, I recently found this gem and it made me so happy I feel compelled to bring it up every time I can. I miss that Youtube, it was such a different place back then.
Yep, I was coming to comment that my company hired him for an event we had maybe 10 years ago. It was standard “work hard and you can accomplish anything” stuff peppered with HR friendly jokes and bits of the dance routine. It was weird though because most of the people there were either too young or too old to have any idea who he was or what video people were talking about.