Virus-microbe interactions have been studied in great molecular details for many years in cultured model systems. With current incapacity to culture many members of the microbial community, methods such as co-occurrence, nucleotide composition and other statistical frameworks have been widely used to infer such interactions since the advent of high-throughput sequencing. However, their accuracy and relevance is still debatable. Here, we introduce a community-wide ecological perspective on marine viral communities and potential interaction with their hosts, without trying to match specific virus-host pairs. By fractionating a body of water samples into "free viruses" and "microbes" (i.e. also viruses inside or attached to their hosts) and looking at how virus abundance changes over time along the different fractions, we show that the viral community is undergoing a change in rank abundance across seasons, suggesting a seasonal succession of viruses in the Red Sea. Additionally, we use abundance patterns in the different fractions to classify viral populations, indicating on potentially different interaction with their hosts. Finally, we show that similar virus groups can differ in their hourly resolved intracellular abundance, which might suggest on a different infection cycle, or metabolic capability.