This article won’t go viral – it’s not going to happen. It could be a great read, but it’s not going to go viral. It might well be perfectly constructed from beginning to end and leave you contemplating the nuances of internet psychology, but it’s not going to go viral.
One reason this piece won’t go viral is that it speaks to a comparatively small demographic. Having taken a few cursory glances over the content, it will be apparent to readers that it’s basically about online journalism. Even a non-specific beginning that could allude to there being GIFs of internet cats and videos of screaming goats somewhere down the page won’t have been enough to hook enough people necessary to achieve the mass amount of sharing that constitutes virality. I could even mention Amanda Bynes and it wouldn’t change a thing.
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There are lots of pieces of questionable quality on the web, each attempting to provide the secrets behind writing that goes viral. Needless to say, the system doesn’t quite work like that. Like diets, if the formula were that straightforward, we wouldn’t need them. But, having experienced astronomically huge success in this field (I once wrote an article that was shared by both Derren Brown and Tim Minchin), I’m intrigued. Can we to any extent plan our way to becoming viral successes? Or is the entire debate a contemporary exercise in futility?
Crucial to this piece’s lack of virality – and I can tell you this, because I’ve read all of it – is that it doesn’t evoke any “anger, awe or anxiety”. These are the three As that, having studied a mass of data, Professor Jonah Berger identified as particularly important in the sharing of online material. That’s why this article won’t go viral; however strongly you feel about optimising content for online consumption, it’s unlikely you’re going to vent your spleen after reading an article on the subject – unless it gets really racist at the end.
Berger and his team analysed data from over 7,000 New York Times articles and found that, “while more positive or more negative content is more viral than content that does not evoke emotion, positive content is more viral than negative content”. Fairly intuitive, you might think. But one of the more intriguing and perhaps unwelcome conclusions is that eliciting more intensely negative emotions could work in the favour of those creating content for the online market. Berger found that articles that simply left readers sad were comparatively unlikely to be shared, but articles that evoked “high-arousal emotions”, like anger or anxiety, were among those likeliest to hit the jackpot. Essentially, if you want to freak people out, try to really, irreversibly freak them out forever.
I spoke to Daniel Cristo, Director of SEO Innovation at Catalyst Online, who wrote an article claiming that, in order to go viral, an article must first and foremost challenge what the readers thought they knew.
“People will always be extremely interested in anything that violates their schemas,” Cristo told me. “Nobody approves of terrorist acts or political scandals, but everyone wants to know the details.” Cristo went on to contemplate the ways in which the online revolution has affected readers’ sensitivity to news reportage. He warned that headlines have become “so sensational that they border on lying. If we cry wolf too many times, we lose our readers’ trust”. He charts the evolution from “one-off newspapers” with eye-catching headlines to journalistically-sophisticated subscription ‘papers, like the Wall Street Journal, and notes that matters have come full-circle: in a bid to maximise readership, news is returning to a point at which its headlines are increasingly sensationalist in a crowded cyber-marketplace.
One factor at play in an article’s virality must simply be how good the writing is. Though Berger cites the “complexity” of writing, its quality isn’t touched upon (because how do you quantify quality?), but it’s crucial to note that bad writing can often find a platform as readily as good writing. One of the more recent Daily Mail articles by Samantha Brick, for example, is technically terrible as a piece of writing, but was shared by thousands on Twitter within a matter of hours, and her name became a trending topic in the same space of time.
The word “viral” stems, of course, from “virus” and it’s in occasions such as these that its lineage seems most appropriate. Your finest prose might not always be to your credit in viral terms; were he to have written for the Daily Mail, I’m not 100 percent confident that Marcel Proust’s articles would have been frantically cyber-shared. And not just because they’d have been in French.
What I found comforting in Berger’s results was the discovery that longer articles are more likely to go viral, along with those by famous authors and women (the internet has always been a sexist place). In an age in which we’re reading less and less of more and more, this is good to know, and at the very least a tribute to the intelligence of the readers of the New York Times.
Berger also hints at more research into who it is we share content with and what this reveals about us, citing social currency as a key factor; we share content partly because of how we appear as a result. Put a Squadda Bambino song on on your Facebook wall and that backpack hip-hop girl you’re into might Like it and invite you to stand next to her in the queue for the next Air Yeezy drop; retweet something from the @philosophytweet account and the strangers who follow you might be tricked into believing you’re profound and tortured, profoundly tortured or, less desirably, torturedly profound.
It’s both amusing and disconcerting to examine the results of Berger’s research and studies similar to it, like Jure Leskovec et al’s “The Dynamics of Viral Marketing“. We like to imagine that we’re not consumers, that we’re not susceptible to manipulation by corporations or celebrities. But we do have strings, of course, and it would be naïve to think that they’re not yanked at occasionally.
YouTube’s Kevin Allocca, however, cites “unexpectedness” as a key factor in a video’s virality, so it ought to be obvious that even the experts are still dealing with unknown quantities. Here I find myself agreeing with Neetzan Zimmerman, founder of The Daily What: “Understanding why something works is an exercise in futility… once you’ve established the viral probability of a video or an image or an idea… the ‘why’ is no longer important. It has been commodified by the internet and lifted above the noise. It is significant because it was significant enough to get noticed in the first place.” In other words: we still don’t really know why things go viral. And, at the moment, we’re all but guessing.
Amanda Bynes.
Follow Ralph on Twitter: @OhHiRalphJones
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