Does anybody real watch viral videos?

According to Viral Video Chart, the top ten videos of the past year have been:

• Miss South Carolina
• Paul Potts sings Nessun Dorma
• Prisoners in the Philippines dancing Thriller
• Dramatic Look hamster
• Sarah Silverman and Matt Damon
• Battle at Kruger
• Leave Britney Alone
• Free Hugs Campaign
• Daft Hands - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
• Evolution of Dance

Regardless of whether these are indeed the top ten or not (the numbers don't tally with YouTube and it seems a little odd that Obama's Yes I Can and Dove Evolution don't make it in), they are certainly some of the best known viral videos.

But - how many real people have watched these videos? I don't mean us in the industry, or anyone in Silicon Valley, or most of the employees at companies such as IBM, Sun, BT, the BBC ... companies heavily skewed towards technology. I mean normal people that brands (evaluating viral video) might want to target? And yes, the technology industry does employ some normal people, but you get my point.

I have asked around (no expenses spared here when it comes to methodology) and I can't find any. Not a single one. Which doesn't mean they don't exist but it does make me suspect that the influencing prowess of viral video may not be as clear cut as it seems at first glance.

20 million views is enough to make a video one of the year's top ten. Assume that on average, each viewer watches a video twice (I have watched most of the above a lot more than that). So 10 million viewers. Say that 60% of these are in the US, 30% in Europe and 10% elsewhere (I am guessing that the list above is very US-centric, despite Paul Potts being in it). So 3 million in Europe, of which say 1.5 million in the UK.

Comparing that to BARB TV viewing figures (a huge leap, I realise), 1.5 million is a typical audience for programmes such as Neighbours, the Simpsons, Hollyoaks, Newsnight and Ready Steady Cook. Yet, most people I know have watched these programmes (half of the people I know watch these programmes regularly), and no one I know has watched the viral videos. More significantly, everyone in the universe knows about those programmes, but I still can't find anyone normal who has heard about the above videos. I am particularly interested in the Paul Potts videos. Around 80M views all told, so say 40M viewers, of which surely a good 10M must be in the UK despite his US promotions and his worldwide success. That's more people than watch Eastenders. Surely not. I don't doubt that viral video is reaching a lot of people, but more investigation is needed into who these people are and how they overlap with marketers' target audiences.

PS I did eventually find one person who has watched a viral video. A twelve year old nephew of a friend in Malta has seen Ahmed the Terrorist. It seems perfectly normal that teenagers are a big audience for viral video, and a very important one, but still not the one sought by the likes of Dove or BMW. 

Addendum: Facebook has about as many members as Evolution of Dance has views. And that trickles through to me as "quite a few people I know are on Facebook" but "nobody I know has watched Evolution of Dance". The same broadly goes for MySpace or Linkedin or for much smaller websites. I realise this blog post depends on the validity of the "people I know" sample, so apply the same question to your peer group (of peers who don't work in technology) - do they watch all these viral videos?