T E X T
The word ‘viral’ has lost its meaning
The nature of virality has shifted radically over the
past decade as the internet has fractured into uncounted
disparate algorithms, platforms, and niche communities. The
volume of content being churned out every day has
skyrocketed, the life cycle of each piece of media has grown
shorter and social media platforms continue to inflate public
metrics, devaluing previously impressive online stats.
All of these factors have rendered the term “viral”
nearly meaningless, say experts, and have led to a condition
we’ll call “viralflation.” The term speaks to the diminished
meaning of virality. If everything is labeled viral, then is
nothing viral?
“Back in the day, 1 million views was the thing,” said
Marcus Stringer, a partner manager at Social Blade, a social
media analytics platform. “That meant you’d gone viral, and
you’d get picked up by news agencies around the world.
Now, tens of millions of views is the norm for top YouTube
channels. Soon, 20 million views will eventually become the
norm.”
“Because the concept of virality has been so watered
down, truly viral pieces of content must reach hundreds of
millions of people at a scale that’s increasingly unattainable
for anyone but MrBeast,” said Lara Cohen, vice president of
partners and business development at Linktree, a platform
that allows creators to aggregate links to their social media
profiles on one page. MrBeast is the internet name of Jimmy
Donaldson, YouTube’s most watched creator.
A decade and a half ago, there was a clear delineation
between viral content and the vast majority of media that
users would encounter every day. The internet was smaller,
and most sharing was manual (people emailing and
messaging links to each other) or via early internet
aggregators such as sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.
Viral content emerged slowly, so the life span of a
viral video was long. Some content remained viral for up to a
year, worming its way through the internet as it gained
traction. When social media platforms began to switch to
algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement in the mid
2010s, the viral content cycle accelerated, experts said.
Brands began recognizing the power of virality and started
to attempt to manufacture it. Content creators joined
engagement groups where they’d reshare each other’s
content in attempts to force virality.
Platforms themselves also began to realize the power
of virality and sought to generate it, or at least generate the
appearance of it. This was the beginning of the era of
viralflation. Facebook helped lower the industry-wide
threshold for what counted as a video view, and began
inflating view counts on various Facebook videos in an effort
to make them appear more viral than they were.
Then TikTok broke into the mainstream in 2020,
lowering the bar even further for what counted as a “view.”
While a view on Facebook counts after three seconds of
watch time, a view on TikTok is simply an impression,
meaning the video was served to a user for at least a
fraction of a second on screen. According to the company,
TikTok also counts each loop of the video as a view, allowing
videos to rake in massive view counts.
“The speed at which we cycle through trends and sort
of moments of virality on the internet is faster now largely
because of TikTok,” Cohen said. This has created an arms
race among tech platforms to see which could inflate
metrics the most. There’s been an incentive to have these
numbers look bigger because they look better to advertisers,
so there’s a financial incentive to cause this viral inflation.
A new class of content creators also has raised the
bar for what’s considered viral. “When MrBeast started to
explode, things really started to change in the landscape,”
Stringer said. “People didn’t consider [earlier metrics of virality] viral anymore, because he’s getting multi millions of
views per video.”
Coco Mocoe, a trend forecaster in Los Angeles, said
that along with these shifts, users are also consuming a
higher total amount of content online per day, especially
members of Generation Z, those born between 1998 and
2012. They are more likely to consume all forms of media
through the internet and social platforms, rather than via
newspapers or TV. And, much of that content is short form
and less than 60 seconds long. “The main reason there are
bigger numbers now is because people are consuming so
much more content in a given sitting,” she added.
This has made virality more ephemeral. “There’s not
that same… permanence,” Mocoe said. “If you’re watching
50 videos with 1 million views, you’re less likely to
remember one as opposed to a decade ago, when you might
only watch five videos a day, and just one would have 1
million views.” For the average consumer, viralflation has
made it increasingly difficult to tell what is and isn’t actually
viral. Because we no longer have any shared sense of
virality, it makes it easier for people who don’t understand
the mechanics of the internet to fall for fake viral trends.
Adapted from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ 2024/03/09/
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