HOWTO be viral

Upworthy, a startup that helps promote material via "viral" distribution, has posted a short slideshow with some interesting (and depressing -- it all comes down to horrible Facebook) insights into how things become popular online.

How To Make That One Thing Go Viral (via O'Reilly Radar)

• [UnderachievingSheep]

  “Viral Curator”? that’s a job title now, really? It qualifies right up there with “SEO Expert” and “Social Media Guru”. Which is to say, it’s the kind of job title that would probably entice my mother and not people who are already aware of how internet culture works.

  Also, I’d say if you need this guide to create content with the hopes that it will go viral, chances are your content is neither viral-worthy nor very original to begin with. 

  • [Adam Mordecai]

    The first thing we say is we know nothing. Our job is to find good content from smart organizations who aren’t focused on making sure people get to see their amazing work, and make sure it gets seen. Kind of like Boing Boing, but not as cool.

    • [Charles Lenchner]

      Adam Mordecai is an underpaid god of the internets. Everything they said about The Oatmeal guy calculating his way to page views? True for Adam. Good thing he’s on our side!

  • [Adam Mordecai]

    I like to think that helping little girls get more interest in being engineers, telling people that body image shouldn’t define them, telling people that gay marriage is totally awesome, telling Mitt Romney that gay soldiers are people too and shaming a publicly traded company for making sexist products is all pretty worthy content. And the 10,000,000 people who saw it but otherwise might not have would hopefully agree?

  • [Cowicide]

    “SEO Expert”

    You don’t think there’s such a thing as a search engine optimization expert?  Strange.

    What should the most experienced, educated and highest performing Google optimization consultants call themselves that would better suit your sensibilities?

• [hazmat]

  Don’t forget “annoy the fuck out of people with popups” – I’ve been actively avoiding upworthy links for a while now. Look at where it got X10!

  • [mr_bloo_sky]

    Sometimes they have some interesting content, but I avoid the site like the plague because of all of the reminders to SHARE the content. It reminds me of one of the reasons I got rid of my television in the early 2000s: the screen was always covered with everything but the content I wanted to see, including reminders about what I was watching, what I could be watching next, what I should be watching later, what channel I was watching, special offers, etc., most of them moving, and often with little people in them.

• [nixiebunny]

  Upworthy is one of those sites that wants to be important, but they don’t seem to do anything other than get in the way.

• [waetherman]

  How would they explain the success of Suck.com?

• [JustinSBeach]

  What Hazmat said … I initially “liked” and subscribed to Upworthy but it got old fast because their links were covered with Popups, they practically beg you to like and share everything and I’d already seen most of their content anyway. 

  • [Adam Mordecai]

    We were annoying ourselves with like and share on Facebook, so we stopped saying Like and Share on our facebook wall.

• [mrmcd]

  Is this the worlds most irritating PowerPoint presentation by the Internet’s most irritating wankers? Click LIKE and SHARE and let us know what you think in the comments!

  We used to just call these people spammers.

  • [UnderachievingSheep]

    Also, they used the most worn and tired memes to illustrate the presentation. Because you know, when I ponder on fresh, original and viral worthy content, my first thought is a LOL Cat.

    • [Boundegar]

      To be fair, you may not be the target audience.  I’m guessing it’s rich white grandfathers.

      • [Adam Mordecai]

        Actually, your mom is. Slide 20. (Seriously, I’m not trying to make a dig about your mom.)

        • [Boundegar]

          Fine.  Grandmothers then.

  • [Adam Mordecai]

    Fun fact: we did some analysis and figured out tacky and poorly made things often share better than classy things.

    • [Steve Taylor]

       I believe you. That’s part of what made your presentation so depressing.

• [HubrisSonic]

  ouch, tough crowd.

  • [Adam Mordecai]

    Truer words have never been spoken.

  • [C W]

    Why should we love any viral kingmaker? Viral “entertainment” is for the most part terrible. I appreciate that their rep seems to be nice, but yeesh.

• [Michael Rosenbloom]

  Here’s the thing, while many commenters here have found the pop-overs annoying, many others must undoubtedly think that they’re wonderful, otherwise they wouldn’t be using them. That’s one of the gorgeous things about A/B testing; if you’re doing it right it should tell you the difference between two things, regardless of other factors. Little tiny design things do matter a lot, what’s annoying to one may be used by hundreds, and if it’s numbers you’re after, then that’s what you do.

  • [Jim Saul]

    Which is why we can’t have nice things.

    Did I quit too early, before the click-fraud as profit-maker part?

  • [C W]

    “while many commenters here have found the pop-overs annoying, many others must undoubtedly think that they’re wonderful”

    Your analysis is ungrounded in reality. I accidentally click on obtrusive ads, but that doesn’t mean I find them “wonderful”.

  • [grimc]

    There’s nothing “gorgeous” about A/B testing. It’s a crutch for the indecisive, unskilled and/or cowardly.

    • [Adam Mordecai]

      AB testing means the difference between 10,000 people seeing a piece of content endorsing gay marriage and 1,000,000. Every time I pick a headline that I think will win, I usually lose.

• [robcat2075]

  Compare those to HuffPost’s rules which seem to mandate the use of “Slams”, “Destroys”, “Again” and/or “said WHAT?” in every headline.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    “You’ll never believe what…..!”

  • [Adam Mordecai]

    We have a tendency to abuse the word awesome. We’re trying to get better about that.

• [bkad]

  My employer blocks this site as a ‘personal storage’ site so I’ll have to look at this later. But my (naive?) question, if you’re running a business, is ‘why would you try to create a viral anything? Sure, nice if  you succeed, but it seems like a lot of work and risk for a small chance of reward.’ Why isn’t “create a successful advertising campaign” good enough? Is going the viral the only way to do this?

  • [Boundegar]

    Shut up.  All the cool kids are doing it.

    • [Christopher]

      Good catch! For a second there I was afraid he was on to us.

  • [nixiebunny]

    Yes, they have it backwards. Viral popularity isn’t created, it happens.

    They’d like to bottle random chance. Good luck with that.

    • [Adam Mordecai]

      That’s why we have luck listed as the most important way to make things go viral. We are under no delusions that you can make anything just go viral.

    • [C W]

      “Viral popularity isn’t created, it happens.”

      I usually think the opposite. For the most part, it’s engineered, and only rarely does it not have a corporation behind it these days. I can avoid commercials on television, but the only way I can avoid commercials in my social networking feed is to disable all of them.

      • [nixiebunny]

        Did Rebecca Black create her “Friday” video with the intent of having it viewed a billion times? No. That’s why they call it viral. It’s unexpected.

        • [Adam Mordecai]

          Yea, we can’t make anything go viral. It has to be the right place, the right time, the right framing, and a completely unpredictable unconscious decision on the part of the public. We only have one tiny piece of the larger set of variables, so we are in no way telling people it’s an exact science. There’s just things you can do to help, and then pray really hard that the rest of that stuff falls into place.

      • [Adam Mordecai]

        It’s both. Without the content and the massive amounts of luck and the framing abandon all hope. Unless the content itself resonates it ain’t gonna happen.

  • [trefecta]

    Conceptually yes, but we’ll have to hit the ground running and take this Viral ideation to the next level. Let’s circle back and synergize with our temporary experiential contractors’ fresh IP to think outside of the box, utilizing web 2.5 learnings to upcrease our ROI by EOM.

  • [Adam Mordecai]

    Our goal is too make sure good ideas get out there. Only 6 of our posts have broken 1 million out of 2000 so its always a challenge.

• [SedanChair]

  Upworthy, a startup that helps promote material via “viral” distribution

  And you’re helping them?

  • [zotlerg]

    Exactly! They got themselves on BoingBoing didn’t they?
    On page 20 they presume everybody’s mothers are middle aged!! Aww, bless their little cotton socks!

    • [Adam Mordecai]

      Not everyones. But the ones who share on Facebook the most.

      • [zotlerg]

        I thought they are talking to the people making the virals not the ones watching them.

        • [Adam Mordecai]

          Not even the ones making. The ones framing. And their bosses. So that more good ideas can get out there.

• [semiotix]

  These are good rules, but there’s also this one weird old tip discovered by a mom that really helped my videos go viral. *cLiCk HeRe* to learn how!

  • [invictus]

    You need to fix your link; it’s coming up as a relative URL rather than an absolute one. (Disqus parses any link that doesn’t start with “http” as a relative)

• [Marko Raos]

  deeply depressing site

• [pbasch]

  Well, yes. Annoying. Promotes distraction, 3sec attention spans, is bad for the culture (what’s left of it, anyway… just heard the MOST depressing bit of culture news – a school system wants children to read technical manuals INSTEAD of fiction).
  ALL THAT BEING SAID, their principles of headline writing also apply to all writing: hero, villain, conflict, happy ending.
  For more on this (if you have the attention span to read a longish essay after F’book has burned out your cortex), check out Tolkein’s “On Fairy Stories”.
  So, dismiss this for what it is, namely minor evil, but take from it what is valuable.

• [Griffin Boyce]

  I have a bit of an interesting perspective on this, since last year something I made was in BoingBoing, which caused the project to go viral. It got just north of 12k downloads and insane amounts of views/shares and articles in dozens of media outlets.

  Here is what most people miss when they think of virality — whatever you’re promoting *MUST* be both high-valence AND worthwhile.  If it’s not highly useful, it must be highly entertaining. The discussion around it must also be highly useful or highly entertaining.

  All media tends to favor extremes, and the internet favors novelty, hope, outrage, and cats. Never forget the cats.

• [anotherfreakinusername]

  Boy, this really inspired me to work really hard on a video in the hopes that someday Upworthy can post ads on it. 

  Seriously, why do people share this stuff?  Why not click through to the original source of the cool video/story/project/whatever and share THAT?

  • [Adam Mordecai]

    Well, that works, however, we are often able to amplify it by a factor of 10 or more. We haven’t had anyone ask us to not use their stuff. They usually start sending us MORE, because we can make sure a ton more people see it. And we always attribute that content and give them credit. If you look at the case studies, it will explain it clearer. A witty headline is great, but you also need your site to be optimized to make people share, and your facebook presence to make people click (since everyone already is on there, they won’t just come to you if your content is good, unless you are extremely lucky.) We’re working on making our popup interface less annoying.

    Once everyone is able to frame things in a compelling way and focus their site on optimizing on that, we’ll be irrelevant. Until then, we’re here to make sure those good ideas and videos get seen by a lot more eyes. 
    We’ve helped people prevent their houses from being forclosed on, helped women’s organizations push their messages about the horrible ways the media perpetuates horrible ideas about body image, helped a toy company get girls more interested in engineering, etc… We’re not here to steal other people’s stuff, we’re here to help elevate it and get their entire org more attention that it deserves. Look at slide 25. The exact same piece of content, two different headlines. 1 version was seen by 8000 people, the other version has now been seen by 800,000. The original artist, depending on their location still gets traffic, and if you look at their youtube stats we can bump them exponentially. That’s their traffic, not ours.

    So framing the content is just as important as the content itself. And if we can help get those ideas out there, we’re gonna sleep fine at night. 

    • [Adam Mordecai]

      Also if someone did ask us not to post their stuff, we totally would respect that and take it down.

    • [Avi Techwriter]

      Thanks Adam! The slides inpired me to take a stab at making some of my own content viral:
      http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/16c329/heres_how_to_get_your_7year_old_hooked_on_chess/

      • [Adam Mordecai]

        Write 25 headlines. Your’s is pretty good, but you might find a better one. I’ll start:
        1. They’re Using These Kids As Pawns To Do What?
        2. I Can’t Believe They Got 7 Year Olds Addicted To This
        3. Challenging Your Kid To Think Could Make Them King
        4. How To Pawn Your Children For Love And Profit

        • [Avi Techwriter]

          That’s amazing Adam:) Thanks!
          So the trick is in having the disciple to hold yourself to actually writing out 25 headlines! I’ll be doing that first thing in the morning on the way to work:)

• [Pip_R_Lagenta]

  They make “going viral” into a set of tricks like Search-Engine-Optimizing.  A game?  I don’t want to play that game, but I suppose that there are plenty of other people ready to take up the challenge.

• [orwell]

  so, why exactly are those pens sexist? 

  also, i tend to believe that any longer, once something becomes the latest “thing,” it’s time to find the “new,” thing (i.e. “viral,” anything, “xtreme,” in any product name, the changing google “doodle,” and any of the douchy descriptors used in job postings (ninja this, rock-star that, guru whatever…))

  if you’re leading rather than following, you’re doing your own “thing…”

  • [Adam Mordecai]

    I generally tell people I’m a writer, just sounds fancier that way. The pens are condescending because the only thing they changed was the colors and then stamped them “For ladies!” Ellen’s routine resonated with everyone who hates vapid advertisements. Which helped.

• [Adam Mordecai]

  Ah, yes, the speling mistates. Bravo on the geting me with teh zing. 

  Sometimes we AB test and the results aren’t big enough to call a win for either one and we go with our best judgement. But when there’s a significant difference in clicks, we’ll take the math over our own judgement. Anyone who claims they can call a headline every time is like the SEO guy or the marketer who says they can make anything go viral. We never assume we know what will win, because we’re almost always wrong. That’s why we seem to be doing well, because we learn from our wrongness and improve upon it each time. 

  That’s also why the title of the presentation includes the words “just kidding” and “good luck with that.” And why the final page says “No we can’t make that thing go viral.” There is no secret recipe, just testing things until they do slightly better than last time.If you aren’t testing, you are leaving chips on the table. Math doesn’t lie.