The good folks at YouTube have provided an entertaining and enlightening review of the top videos of the year. You can read the whole blogpost here. And here is a video montage they put together:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFnXm6cjGwU]

What strikes me about the most popular videos is how they are almost all produced by amateurs and their popularity was almost entirely fueled by sharing and word of mouth. Sure, it’s possible to produce a video spot and get a few hundred thousand eyeballs to watch just about anything including a 30 second commercial made for TV. What’s hard is to produce something that is so compelling that people take the extra few seconds to spend a bit of social capital to encourage their friends, followers, or fans to check it out. Being able to predict when this will happen is still more art than science.