

The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos - abarrera
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-behind-many-viral-videos

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sbh
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.

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Tichy
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?

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rms
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.

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icky
Find the security hole in your plan. :)

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rms
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.

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

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rms
yes, that would also be bad

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

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joshwa
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.

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

There is no such thing as bad publicity.

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jsb
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.

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

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richcollins
Wow I never would have guessed that spamming can work.

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amichail
Also see:

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

~~~
ed
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?"

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

