It’s always interesting to watch a video go viral – as it happens. The last video I remember watching going wild on YouTube was The Mean Kitty Song. When I first saw it, it had about 250K views. I loved it, of course, and watched its progress with amazement – the clip went to a million views in no time, and today it has over 35 million views. Of course, it has a cute cat, a cute guy and a cute song – that’s really hard to beat.

The last few days’ YouTube star is altogether different (and hilarious). It was first uploaded to YouTube on January 2010, and didn’t get too much attention. On July 4th, however, it was embedded by The Huffington Post – which led to many views, embeds and comments.

When I first encountered this clip, I wondered why in the hell 3 minutes of rainbows might interest someone, but then I pressed PLAY and couldn’t stop laughing:

When I first saw the video, it had about 200K views. It now sports almost 3 million views, and it will probably accumulate more. Not bad for a home-made, loopy, shaky video. Naturally, it was copied and uploaded to YouTube by other users.

This very authentic and somewhat-crazy clip has no cats in it, no cute songs or Star Wars characters, but it managed to sprout quite a few video responses, the best of which is the Double Rainbow Song, which currently has 1.4 million views:

It’s nice to see authentic viral clips out there. Nowadays, it seems like every other successful clip on YouTube is actually a well coordinated marketing effort by one company or another.

I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a Nike ad or something.