A Case Study of Virality

About 10 days ago, a user called "mylifesuxnow" posted on Reddit about how he caught his wife cheating on him. He then proceeded to send updates to Reddit throughout the weekend as his scheme to collect proof developed. It involved private investigators, more cheating women, and the story went on. I personally believe it was fake but it did not matter. Reddit ate it all up as a juicy story full of twists and lies. By the end of the second day of updates, the story received almost 1 million unique views.

Now, my blog post is less about how real or well-written the story is and more about how the internet has changed the way information spreads. A completely anonymous person with just a free weekend and a laptop could have pulled this off with $0 budget. The beauty of virality is that the dollar spend and audience engagement are not necessarily correlated. But of course, the variance of success is much larger and you cannot easily procure virality. The very nature of it requires content going viral to be genuine. Some companies have attempted to game virality through procurement. In the name of learning, enjoy this somewhat successful virality stunt by Nissan:

Once you do achieve the viral status though, you can begin monetizing it. In the case of mylifesuxnow from Reddit, other people jumped right at the opportunity. Some started making movie posters based on his story and put it on sale for $5 a piece. Others turned the story into an eBook for sale. One made a website called www.mylifesuxnow.com after the original posts were deleted, presumably due to legality/maximum drama reasons. The site apparently received 260k visits in the past five days and the domain is now on sale to the highest bidder.

Make engaging content and count on the internet to make it spread. Quality trumps dollar spend in this age.