How to go viral

Nine years ago, an eighteen-year-old American posted a video onto Newgrounds.com of himself dancing and lip-synching to “Dragostea din tei” that almost immediately went viral. You may better recognize this song as “Numa Numa“. Today, the video has almost 53 million views on YouTube alone.

In the history of the internet, this particular video was the first video to go viral.  How did that happen? How did a low-quality video of an unknown young adult lip-synching garner such attention?  When the marketing industry spends copious amounts of money trying to achieve this sort of exposure, how did a random guy do so without even trying?