An accurate title can ruin the appeal of an unexpected viral video. If the video “guy runs into wall” weren’t titled “guy runs into wall”, you would not know from the onset that a guy is about run into a wall, which would thus allow the video to reach maximum shock value.
This is a concept I had never really thought about, but the team at Surprisely built an app around it. Their brainchild allows users to wrap YouTube videos in a way that prevents recipients from seeing the title, description, view count, or any other errata.
Surprisely’s design is very simple: Find the YouTube video you want, paste it in, choose another video to dub over it if for some reason that is a thing you want to do, and then share the new URL with your friends
to ensure maximum surprise. Conveniently enough, Surprisely also removes pre-roll ads, so you can also use it to circumvent them if you really hate ads and haven’t discovered Ad Block Pro yet.Surprisely is, at its heart, just another toy for YouTube viewers who want to feel like they’ve found cooler, more unexpected videos than any of their friends (I am definitely one of these people.) Give it a try, unless you don’t particularly like surprises.
Update, Oct. 6: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the relationship between…
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