Forces behind viral videos

NEW YORK (FOX 5 NEWS) - Unless you shun social media and the internet as a whole you probably recognize Pizza Rat, who was an Internet sensation of 2015. While you may know the clip was filmed in New York at an L train station, you may not know that a Los Angeles company helped catapult the video to international fame, leading to seemingly endless news coverage, a slew of imitators, even sexy Halloween costumes.

Josh Entman is cofounder and chief development officer of Jukin Media, which employs a team to scour the web for the next Pizza Rat or Curling Iron Girl.

The Jukin team pays to license the videos from their creators and pumps them out through numerous distribution channels, which is how Pizza Rat ends up on the morning shows or Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Remember the baby who stops crying at the sound of Katy Perry's "Dark Horse"? That's one of theirs. So is this little boy getting terrified.

Most of the videos Jukin license and distribute are organic real moments that happen to be caught on camera. But then there are people like Mark Douglas, the creator and star of YouTube channel the Key of Awesome, who produce content designed to go viral.

Key of Awesome's parody of Kesha's "Tic Tok" has been viewed more than 141 million times. And there are dozens and dozens more like it. Douglas says his recipe to success is a fairly simple one.

Ryan Berger is a branding expert and partner in the company Hypr-A Database of the world's biggest social influencers. Berger says there's a whole other component to going viral that involves getting the content into the right hands, or rather on the right feeds, to get it noticed.

Take a candid moment or a hilarious spoof or prank, spread it through the right channels, and there you have your viral video.