Viral Video Nostradamus?

This is the first of an experimental new series I'm currently calling Viral Nostradamus.  A sort of companion piece to the Friday Viral Round Up, this series takes a look at viral success from the opposite end of the process.  Rather than discussing videos that have already gone viral, Viral Nostradamus will be about trying to foolishly predict which brand new videos will be the most likely to get insanely popular.

I have no doubt most of my predictions will go wrong, but it should be fun anyway.  Right now, I have only one rule, and that's that the video has to be very new--uploaded within the last two days.  That rules out anything that has really had time to build a huge following, but also allows me to choose vids that are already trending toward popularity by gaining views quickly.

SEE ALSO: Viral Video Nostradamus - Bieber, Bears, and Actors - Will These Videos Go Viral?

It's all an exercise in futility anyway, as even defining what "viral success" means varies from person to person.

Anyway, in my extensive research ("research" = hours of wasting time on YouTube on a Saturday), I have found the following three videos to contain some of the necessary ingredients viral successes often have in common.

1. iPad Destruction

Viral Ingredients: current event topic (iPad), destruction

Uploaded: One day ago

Current View Total: 103,701

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGUppxoJUVg" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGUppxoJUVg']);" rel="nofollow, external" target="_blank"><img class="nopin" src="http://i.ytimg.com/vi//0.jpg" alt="Viral Video Nostradamus?" title="0"/></a>

2. iPad Magic

Viral Ingredients: celebrities are like us (Wozniak standing in line for an iPad), unexpected talents (he does magic)

Uploaded: One day ago

Current View Total: 65,509

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obW80HDtNE4" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obW80HDtNE4']);" rel="nofollow, external" target="_blank"><img class="nopin" src="http://i.ytimg.com/vi//0.jpg" alt="Viral Video Nostradamus?" title="0"/></a>

3. Tay Zonday's "Traffic Machine"

Viral Ingredients: star of or reference to previous viral hit ("Chocolate Rain"), original music

Uploaded: Just under two days ago

Current View Total: 67,087

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLkjxePttcY" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLkjxePttcY']);" rel="nofollow, external" target="_blank"><img class="nopin" src="http://i.ytimg.com/vi//0.jpg" alt="Viral Video Nostradamus?" title="0"/></a>

And there you have it.  My predictions from Easter weekend on which videos are most likely to be viral hits by this time next week.  Feel free to come back here in seven days and mock me openly should all these videos fail to get popular.  If any of them are huge, though, you can probably expect a more detailed breakdown of them in future Viral Round Ups.

Have a great finish to the weekend, everyone.

• Viral Video Nostradamus - Babies, Cats and Turtles - Will These Videos Go Viral?

• How To Break All The Rules of Viral Video, and Still Go Viral

• How to Make Video Ad Campaigns Go Viral - A Behind the Scenes Look into the Viral Video Process [Case Study]