The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos | Hacker News Reader

The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos

techcrunch.com

42 pointsabarrera18 comments

All this crap works only because YouTube measures only the number of views of a video, and not how many people stop watching it after the first few annoying seconds.

I've heard the same things about Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and so on (news.YC?). What I don't get: how do you get a significant number of "friends" on those networks who are willing to watch/read your spam?

My real life friends typically don't use social networks and, not being entrepreneuers themselves, they often did not get the point when I asked them to get a stumbleupon account just to rate my site. On the other hand, I could not yet muster the motivation to worm my account onto some other people's friends list just to make them rate my submissions.

How do you handle that problem? Perhaps a "entrepreneur helps entrepreneur" network for those things would be in order?

The last time I suggested news.yc users collectively upvote each others' submissions on digg/reddit I got downmodded... but I'm still game, if you guys are game.

Find the security hole in your plan. :)

Well, the problem with all digg-gaming schemes that I have heard about is that someone usually rats everyone out to Digg and then everyone gets banned.

The security hole I was thinking of is this: it would give an incentive for digg-spammers to set up accounts on news.yc!

yes, that would also be bad

I would be game, but I don't really have useful sites to submit at the moment. One is in german, and the other contains erotica, which are forbidden on digg.

Anyway, I don't think it would even have to be illegal gaming of the system. We could watch each others submissions and if we like them, vote them up.

how do you get a significant number of "friends" on those networks who are willing to watch/read your spam?

One method I've seen work pretty well is to hire people to actually establish semi-legitimate personas on open social networks like MySpace and Hi5. Pay high school girls $10/hr or so to make thousands of friends and you've established a base for some viral marketing.

All I can say is that I'm not really surprised.

this is exactly the kind of stuff that makes people distrustful of "marketing" messages. Sketchy direct marketers have found their way onto the Internet, and now they're finding their way out of the adsense playground.

I think the amount of comments at TC proves that Dan knows he's stuff.

There is no such thing as bad publicity.

I worked in a new media marketing department as an intern for awhile and this is exactly the kind of things they were looking into doing. They wanted to generate buzz by promoting in various online communities as a "community member." Not surprisingly, this is where they had their most success. I fortunately didn't have to participate in the buzz generation but there's no question everyone is looking to do this kind of marketing, whether you like it or not. Marketers will do anything to get eyeballs on their message.

Well, these guys found their way to techcrunch, so they must know something about the novel ways to spam.

Wow I never would have guessed that spamming can work.

Also see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6352

Incidentally the author's website, Findory.com, is now defunct. Looks like the answer was "yes."

From the linked post: "And this makes me wonder, am I ruthless enough? In Findory Video, for example, the system tries to automatically filter the soft porn that appears quite popular on both YouTube and Google Video. Is that a mistake? Findory has never spammed anyone. Findory keeps well within fair use for copyright material. Findory directs traffic to content providers to help them earn revenue from their work. Are those mistakes?"

This sort of behavior will make social networks even more popular, since you will want to only trust your friends.

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