50 Creative, Compelling And Clever Viral Images Shared In 2011

August 9, 2011 Author Adam Singer In The Social Web

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:

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).

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