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The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos
- rms 19y agoAll I can say is that I'm not really surprised.
- amichail 19y agoAlso see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6352 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6352
- ed 19y agoIncidentally 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?"
- amichail 19y agoThis sort of behavior will make social networks even more popular, since you will want to only trust your friends.
- joshwa 19y agothis 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.
- sbh 19y agoAll 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.
- ntoshev 19y agoWell, these guys found their way to techcrunch, so they must know something about the novel ways to spam.
- Tichy 19y agoI'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?
- rms 19y agoThe 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.
- asmosoinio 19y agoI think the amount of comments at TC proves that Dan knows he's stuff. There is no such thing as bad publicity.
- jsb 19y agoI 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.
- richcollins 19y agoWow I never would have guessed that spamming can work.