Going Viral and Information Cascades
These article talks about viral videos from a marketing perspective. In the article the author does a good job at describing how a video goes viral. One is the content and length of the video, to see if its worth sharing in the first place. Viral videos usually grab your attention quick and usually make you either happy and laugh or makes you sad. That determines whether a video is worth sharing or not. A funny quote in the article from YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley on how to make a video go viral goes “Create a video that’s different, unique, emotional, and when in doubt – cats.”
I liked this article because it tries to depict how a viral video gets shared in the first place. Because in class we have talked about the rich get richer principle and this article in a way talks about how the rich got rich in the first place. Virability relates to the rich get richer because the more shares a video has, the more people are going to see it, and thus the more people are likely to share it if its a video worth sharing. I think online popularity also follows this principle. Today more than ever we see social media accounts “blow up” with thousands of followers seemingly out of nowhere. And people with a lot of followers typically continue to gain followers, because they have more and more people sharing their content. The best example I can think of this is the popular Twitch streamer Tyler Blevins, also known as “Ninja”. His channel gained a lot of followers off of some viral clips, and then continued to have enormous growth as his followers increased, because he was the guy everyone watched when it came to Fortnite as the game and his channel grew seemingly side by side. I know the article was not on Ninja but on viral videos, but I think it is a great and recent example of how viralness relates to that rich get richer principle.