Everyone wants a viral video. Some people say you can’t make one… viral videos just happen, or they don’t. Other people say you can put yourself in a position to have a video go viral by keying in on the elements of your content that would make users want to share it. But there’s a third school of thought over at ReelSEO, which has a quick discussion on the value of evergreen videos. They may not have that big, splashy debut or that meteoric climb, but evergreen videos accumulate a lot of views in the long run, and that’s a very good thing.

From a brand perspective, evergreen video can be a great way to engage around search. Pick a product in your house and Google it. Chances are your results won’t include videos that offer more information about that product. The information is most likely available in a forum, on a brand’s website, or on Facebook, but from a user perspective it’s just much easier to watch a one-minute video that tells them what they want to know about X. Naturally, a lot of that content keys off of the “how-to” question. But unfortunately, a lot of brands seem to be missing that opportunity. That’s interesting because companies like Mahalo and eHow are building their business models around low-budget, high-utility videos that give specific answers to common questions. Right now, I’m not sure either one of those companies is killing it with consumers. That is, they may get a lot of traffic, but I’m not so sure their names really resonate. But the big question for brand marketers is why you’d want to let Mahalo or eHow own that space and talk about your product category when you could publish that information yourself (with greater authority) and speak only about your brand’s products?

Faster than a speeding Kony. You know about the video that’s sweeping the Web because you saw it on Facebook / watched it on YouTube. Well now Visible Measure, the analytics and advertising platform for social video, says “Kony” is the fast growing video in history. There are probably a lot of good lesson there in terms of content production, whether your a filmmaker or brand manager.But for now, it’s about the numbers, and they are huge.

Courtesy of Visible Measures

Google’s latest pitch to Madison Ave. Digital advertising can be just as emotional as the iconic campaigns from the Mad Men era. Fair enough, but Google is trying to prove that to Madison Ave. by re-imagining some of those campaigns for the digital era. The New York Times has the details.

No country for continued buffering. Qwilt launches a new network video delivery platform. TechCrunch has the technical details. Bottom line: it’s a tool to help ISPs better manage their networks and deliver faster video.

Netflix on Apple TV. Subscribe to Netflix through iTunes? Yup. And that’s great news!  Some nights you just want to see what’s on Netflix; other nights you want to buy or rent something on Apple TV. Now, you can do both from the same device. #progress.

Paywalls. More newspapers are following The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Here’s an Aussie take on why paywalls may just work. Two things to watch. First, newspapers are producing a lot more video. Video in a newsroom that was all about print a few years back is a big leap and a lot of papers are still staffing up and figuring it out, so it’ll be interesting to see how paywalls impact the relatively new medium of newspaper videos. Second, newspapers will be an interesting testing ground for paywalls in general. If a few papers make it work, we’ll definitely see the paywall model cropping up elsewhere.