Getting the message out via viral video

[jvriezen]

I posted a video of a Rebound Rumble match on YouTube, and in a little more than three days it has more than 132K views.

There are tons of Rebound Rumble match videos on YouTube, but I don't think many have received this many views.

What is it about this video that made it go viral?

Is it exceptional robots? No, the robots in the foreground of the video scored zero points during the entire match! The distant robots scored 45 points -- pretty good, but not great and pretty hard to see, even if you switch to HD and use a large monitor.

Was it the unique camera angle? Maybe, but I had posted numerous matches (with much better performing robots) from the same camera angle after 10K Lakes regional and they didn't get nearly as many hits.

My thought is that it was the exceptional Human player performance of three baskets out of six attempts.

What can we learn from this? My thought is that the 'general public' doesn't appreciate the phenomenal accomplishment of building a robot that can play basketball. Think about it, we have phenomenal machines all around us, starting with the phones on which people are watching this video. To the public, a bunch of strange looking machines playing basketball is weird, but not enticing enough to send a link to the video to a bunch of their friends or post it on facebook. But a kid throwing three balls 58 feet to score baskets is.

The Morgan Freeman promo video (which I linked to in mine, but only after it already had a bunch of views) has 47K views. Why is my video more popular than all the other terrific match videos and Morgan Freeman's video?

What can we do to make similar videos that effectively spread the FIRST message?

My video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvDPNQbLtyY