Be the first to know. Get our weekly newsletter.

newsletter_popup Join 25,000 of your peers. Get our stories delivered to your e-mail inbox every week.
Edit Interests

Articles Selected for You

No unread stories
 
ViralBlog Logo
Close this box

Sign-up to get the content you like


Our readers can personalize ViralBlog in Zite alike ways, and schedule e-mail alerts to get the most relevant answers to their specific questions.

Choose your sign-up method:

Could not connect to Twitter. Refresh the page or try again later.

 

By signing-up you agree upon our terms and conditions

 
02/01/2009 by
9282 views

Viral Friday: The Very Best Of 2008

Viral Friday is the weekly viral video chart of ViralBlog, showing the 5 most popular viral videos, commercials or user-generated videos, carefully selected and ranked by popularity, viral impact & spread.
ViralFriday

First of all – Happy new year and a fantastic 2009! In the first Viral Friday we look back at last year and present to you the 5 most popular virals of 2008!

The #1 position in the Best of Viral Friday 2008 goes to Officemax with Elf Yourself 2008. OfficeMax introduced Elf Yourself once again in 2008 for its third holiday season. The hilarious holiday greeting remains immensely popular with 57 million elves created in just 3 weeks. The runner up spot is for Yes We Can Song. The music video “Yes We Can Song” by Black Eyed Peas’ frontman Will.i.am and director Jesse Dylan became an instant viral sensation last year upon its release in early February. Iraqi Journalist Throws Shoes at Bush completes this week’s top 3. President Bush’s farewell visit to Iraq has become one of the favorites of 2008 in just three weeks’ time.

Do you want to see the rest of Best of 2008 list from 1 to 5? Go on then, and have a look! We’d like to hear your opinion about the virals. Have fun!


1. Elf Yourself 2008

Building on the campaign’s viral success of recent years, OfficeMax introduced Elf Yourself once again in 2008 for its third holiday season. The hilarious holiday greeting, which allows consumers to create dancing elves with the faces of themselves, friends, family, pets, celebrities remains immense popular. In the the first three weeks of the current campaign an astonishing 57 million elves had been created. Average time spent on the site doubled to 15 minutes and blog posts mentioning “ElfYourself” increased to 11,088 according to Google Blogsearch, already doubling last year’s total number of blog postings (5,456).

2. Yes We Can Song

This music video “Yes We Can Song” by Black Eyed Peas’ frontman will.i.am and director Jesse Dylan became an instant viral sensation upon its release in early February with over 50 million views on YouTube and Dipdive. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama even put the video on his website BarackObama.com.

Will.i.am got inspired by Obama’s “New Hampshire Speech” and adapted the lyrics to make the speech into a song. The singer managed to get a variety of stars like Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu, Adam Rodriquez, Amber Valetta, Eric Balfour, Aisha Tyler, Nicole Scherzinger and Nick Cannon to appear in the music video.

3. Iraqi Journalist Throws Shoes at Bush

President Bush’s farewell visit to Iraq three weeks ago has become one of the viral sensations of 2008 thanks to Iraqi TV journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi. During the press conference the President had with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Muntadar took aim and threw his shoes at the President. A combination of the journalists’ bad aim and Bush’s expertise at ducking flying objects saved the president from any potential harm. Seventeen days after its release, the video has generated 22 million views and 150,000+ comments. The incident also ignited a series of funny online games, making fun of Bush like The Bush Game, Flying Babush, Bash A Bush and Sock and Awe

4. Christian The Lion

The story of an unbreakable bond between man and beast was one of the most touching and talked about videos of 2008. It briefly chronicles the true story of a lion being reunited with the two men who raised him in London, years after he’d been released back into the wild in Kenia and become the leader of his own pride. The actual reunion took place in 1972, but this archive footage was rediscovered and posted to YouTube earlier this year. In total the video is watched over 30 million times.

5. Rick Rolled

You’ve been Rick Rolled! Over 20 million internet users have fallen for the ‘Rick Roll’ web prank – a link that’s apparently provided to a seemingly interesting source, when in fact, it is a link to the video of Rick Astley’s 1987 classic “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The first instance of Rickroll occurred in May 2007. On April Fools day 2008 YouTube Rick Rolled its users by linking all of the featured videos to the Rick Astley video. Two more Rick Roll instances surfaced in 2008. In September 2008, Hugh Atkin created John McCain Gets BarackRoll’d and in December 2008, Macy’s rickrolled the NY public at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.