We’ve been documenting images that get passed on throughout the social web since 2008. More than 1 million of you have viewed the series, making it the most popular of our ongoing threads at The Future Buzz.
The point of aggregating the web’s hottest images here is to help you get an understanding of the popular archetypes for successful web content. So many others focus on video and text, but images specifically aren’t always as well documented. Yet they continue to be one of the most potent formats of viral content.
My methodology for gathering these remains the same: it has to break the “hot” threshold on a social site where diversity, aggregation and incentives are in place (so Reddit, Stumble, etc.). I collect the best ones as I go while attempting to gather a diverse amount for you.
So if you’re new to this site (or this series) start by playing catch-up on what the web has been sharing over the past 3 years:
- 50 Viral Images From 2008 And How They Spread (part 1)
- 50 Viral Images Shared in 2009 (part 2)
- 50 More Viral Images Shared in 2009 (part 3)
- 50 Viral Images The Web Shared In 2010 (part 4)
- 50 Clever And Creative Images The Web Shared In 2010 (part 5)
- The Social Web In Pictures: 50 Viral Images Shared In 2011 (part 6)
- 50 (More) Viral Images The Web Shared In 2011 (part 7)
All up to speed?
Great, on to the latest 50 images the web is sharing (captions added by me for context).
Infographics, charts, graphs
Makes sense to me
Creative rock paper scissors infographic
image credit
Organizational design at major tech companies
image credit
Now that’s what I call progress
How volume controls / battery power indicators should work
Adding context to the world’s population density
How bachelors see the world
And for some reason, people have been sharing a tie chart
Creative cupcake infographic
Can we please get this built already?
Still afraid of sharks?
Nature, animals, outdoors
Stunning sunset (or perhaps sunrise)
Underwater park
Easily the cutest picture of this roundup
Nature reclaims a ship
There there friend, it’ll be OK
Timelapse of the stars and fireflies
Best petting zoo photo ever
Soon…
Vibrant colors on the countryside
Ants up close getting a sugar fix
Staircase into the waterfall
Tonight…you
Memes / funny
Every episode of House
Indeed…
Revenge of the nerds (IRL)
What rabbits do when we’re not around
Didn’t there was an “i” in team? Think again…
This is just great
Seems effective enough
This one captions itself
Everything else / random
The real question here is why
Angry vs. surprised light switch
Now this is a good idea
Creative coffee art
Effective CAPTCHA
How to make shopping fun
It all makes sense now
Unique hotels from around the world
Just…awesome
All buildings should have this
Mixer cake
Balloon T-Rex
To boldly go where no cloud has gone before
Best tow-away warning sign ever
Creative sand art
Effective drinking moderation ad
Amazing message in this comic
Velcro, magnified
Bullet shot through crayons captured at the perfect moment
Color coordinated shopping
Note: if I used one of your images and you would like credit, please drop me a note and I’ll update with attribution. Unfortunately an overwhelming majority of users save content on various image hosting services without attribution – so it is difficult to provide that on every image (but I’ve done so where possible).