FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF VIRALITY: Andrew Marantz in the New Yorker on the data-driven repackaging of memes and factoids for social media, mostly shorn from the original creators of the knowledge, ideas or art, and the pathos that would reduce the efficiency of resharing: newyorker/magazine/2015/01/05/virologist Marantz: Spartz, Inc operates thirty sites, which have no unifying aesthetic. Their home pages, which can be chaotic and full of old links, don’t always feature a Spartz logo; traffic is generated almost entirely through Facebook, so brand recognition is relatively unimportant. Most of the company’s innovations concern not the content itself but how it is promoted and packaged: placing unusually large share buttons at the top and the bottom of posts; experimenting with which headlines and photographs would be more seductive; devising strategies for making posts show up prominently in Facebook’s news feed. newyorker/magazine/2015/01/05/virologist According to Emerson Spartz, the young man behind the operation, his parents made him read “four short biographies of successful people every single day. Imagine for a second what happens to your brain when you’re twelve and this is how you’re spending your time.” He used his hands to pantomime his mind being blown. “I realized that influence was inextricably linked to impact—the more influence you had, the more impact you could create. . . . The ability to make things go viral felt like the closest that we could get to having a human superpower.” … “Facebook should be eighty per cent of your effort, if you’re focussed on social media”; “Try to change every comma to a period”; “Use lists whenever possible. Lists just hijack the brain’s neural circuitry.” … “The more awesome you are, the more emotion you create, the more viral it is.” newyorker/magazine/2015/01/05/virologist SECRETS TO SOCIAL SUCCESS: 1) A/B testing headlines. Marantz: Much of the company’s success online can be attributed to a proprietary algorithm that it has developed for “headline testing”—a practice that has become standard in the virality industry. When a Dose post is created, it initially appears under as many as two dozen different headlines, distributed at random. 2) Viral image arbitrage: Marantz: He and his engineers have developed algorithms that scan the Internet for memes with momentum. The content team then acts as arbitrageurs, cosmetically altering the source material and reposting it under what they hope will be a catchier headline. A meme’s success on Imgur, Topsy, or “certain niche subreddits” might indicate a potential viral hit. newyorker/magazine/2015/01/05/virologist DARKSIDE: “If you consider Upworthy to be the starting point for a genre of site that trades in the curiosity gap, then I think Dose and sites like it are the logical conclusion of that trend,” Neetzan Zimmerman said. “Upworthy at least goes through the process of finding the content themselves. On Dose, you see entire lists that are ripped wholesale from other Web sites and passed off as their work. I think there is a cynicism to that.” He added, “But that’s an abstract conversation—it doesn’t make what they’re doing any less effective as a business.” newyorker/magazine/2015/01/05/virologist SPARTZ ON ART: A Katy Perry song was playing on the radio. “Art is that which science has not yet explained,” he said. “Imagine that the vocals are mediocre in an otherwise amazing song. What if you could have forty people record different vocals, and then test it by asking thousands of people, ‘Which one is best?’ To me, that’s a trickle in an ocean of possible ways you could improve every song on the radio.” newyorker/magazine/2015/01/05/virologist AUTHORIAL CODA: Marantz: …the short biographies of successful people that I had heard about … turned out to be extremely short: a single-sided page each, photocopied from a newspaper called Investor’s Business Daily. Each distilled a life of accomplishment into a moral. newyorker/magazine/2015/01/05/virologist I wonder what moral can or should be drawn from this story about the practice and soul of virality online?
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:00:15 +0000
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