The video "Kony 2012" a 30-minute documentary about Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony is an unlikely video to reach the status of the most viral video in history. Uploaded on March 5 the video has been viewed by more than 76 million users on YouTube as of Tuesday, March 13 and has been shared across other social media sites.

According to Visible Measures, an analytics company that has been monitoring the campaign's growth, Kony 2012 has generated over 112 million views from over 750 clips across the web. As of posting time, there are over 860,000 comments for the campaign, created by non-profit group Invisible Children in an effort to expose the war crimes of Joseph Kony the leader of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. As soon as the documentary hit YouTube, subtitled versions of the documentary in Spanish, Italian, French and Chinese was soon uploaded as well.

In an effort to describe how fast Kony 2012 blew up, Visible Measures compared it to other viral videos. Rebecca Black's "Friday" took 45 days to pass 100 million views while Susan Boyle's Britain's Got Talent performance took 9 days to reach 100 million views, Justin Bieber's video "Baby" took 56 days to reach that mark while "Charlie Bit My Finger" took 402 days.

So how did Invisible Children create the fastest growing campaign to date? It helps that the organization had a strong base of followers on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The campaign was also bolstered by celebrity endorsers like Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Diddy, Alec Baldwin, Olivia Wilde, Oprah Winfrey and Justin Bieber who were posting links to the film on their accounts and urging their own followers to retweet the link. Soon the hashtags #kony2012 #stopkony began trending worldwide on Twitter.

"They create narratives that can be boiled down to 140 characters while still engaging people emotionally," social media researcher Danah Boyd told the New York Times. "They create action messages that can be encapsulated into a hashtag."

Kony 2012 also played on people's emotions to make it more popular. According to a study by Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, Dr. Erica Riebe and Dr. Kellie Newstead at the Ehrenberg- Bass Institute for Marketing Science in the University of South Australia videos that evoke marked physiological responses like laughter, crying, anger or shock are most likely to be shared. The stronger emotion a video evokes in the viewer the more likely it will get shared.

Another factor to Kony 2012's success is the fact that Invisible Children urged viewers to share the video to raise awareness about Kony's crimes. By spreading the word about Kony, viewers would help in pressuring Ugandan government officials to arrest Kony by the end of the year. The message struck a chord with many of the young viewers who felt they were all helping in catching the Ugandan rebel.

Invisible Children has received a lot of criticism about the Kony 2012 campaign with critics pointing out the organization oversimplified the issue and that the group only uses 30 percent of its contribution on the ground in Uganda. The criticisms and the media scrutiny over Joseph Kony have only driven more viewers to the documentary.