28 May 2008
Going Viral
Why going viral matters.
Remember Star Wars Kid? At its peak, that video of a fat kid dancing with a digitally inserted lightsaber was generating millions of pageviews for the people hosting the video, and mainstream media went crazy over the phenomenon, introducing millions more to the dancing fat kid. Now look at Rick Astley. His music video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” was the subject of a huge viral prank that started on message boards on the web. What’s known as “Rickrolling” has exposed over 20 million people to Rick Astley’s hit from the 80s, and it’s now his most popular song on iTunes by a large margin. You can’t buy marketing like that.
The inevitable truth is: web users are immensely powerful. Through no more than word of mouth, they can make an idea or a product spread like wildfire all over the web in a matter of hours, introducing it to millions of people. What if you could harness this power and use it to your advantage? Rick Astley was an accident, but the idea is gaining traction, and people are starting to exploit it.
Radiohead are the obvious example. They released an album online recently, DRM-free, and said “pay whatever you want” for it. There’s been plenty of conversation about how this approach is going to revolutionize the music industry, but that’s not the point. The point is: there’s been a lot of conversation. By pandering to what people on the web care about the most — free stuff, DRM, piracy, and so on — it was a foregone conclusion that it would be talked about far and wide. And the result? Radiohead are reported to have made millions from an album that could have been downloaded free of charge.
Now Weezer have employed a similar tactic. Their music video for “Pork & Beans” features all sorts of web celebrities that are immediately recognizable to millions of people. Chris Crocker, Gary Brolsma, Tay Zonday, and a dancing banana are all in the video, as are references to various other recognizable “celebrities” (including Star Wars Kid, naturally). In doing this, Weezer ensured that their music video would be an overnight viral success, and it got over a million views within 24 hours of publishing it online.
By including elements that millions of web users can identify with, a viral hit has been created that will be seen by millions of people (it’s been online 5 days now, and has over 3 million views, and thousands more just while I was writing this). The song will inevitably fare well in all the charts that matter, it will be talked about for a long time, and more importantly for Weezer, it will generate a lot of sales.
If it’s not obvious already, it’s time to come to your senses: the web is a huge, mostly untapped market. Rick Astley knows that, Radiohead know that, Weezer know that, and they’re all benefitting from it. Who’s going to be next?