Viral Video Quotes

Dwarves sat on stoops, clapping and cheering as we ran by. A few of them recorded videos of us on uniquely crafted smartphones. I figured our attempted getaway would go viral on the Dwarven Internet, famous among Internets.

So children are being raised by viral videos, trending topics, and social media stars — instead of parents; and it’s setting up society for a disaster of unimaginable proportions.

The video would probably go viral on GodTok or whatever they were using on Mount Olympus these days.

Hi-YA!" Hedge executed a roundhouse kick on him. This was a notoriously difficult move. Even Ares sometimes fell and broke his tailbone when practicing it in his dojo (witness the 'Ares so lame' video that went viral on Mount Olympus last year, and which I absolutely was not responsible for uploading.

Content Is King, Distribution is Queen

People love to watch viral videos in which one kindly fisherman saves one sea turtle from a snarl of trash; they are less passionate about electing politicians who will dismantle policies that entrench corporate power and allow companies to pump poison into the oceans and skies in order to shore up the immoral wealth of billionaires and further destabilize the lives of the poor who will remain locked in toil until the planet boils us all to death as Jeff Bezos waves good-bye from his private rocket. Strange!

When people come to you online, they are not looking for TV commercials. They are looking for information to help them make a decision.

Barack Obama is the most successful new marketer in history. Study his campaign so that you can adapt the ideas for your business.

The law of internet viral videos states that after a day, everyone should be over it, so I don’t know why I haven’t been replaced with a cat meme or something.

This may explain the odd space that the climate crisis occupies in the public imagination, even among those of us who are actively terrified of climate collapse. One minute we’re sharing articles about the insect apocalypse and viral videos of walruses falling off cliffs because sea ice loss has destroyed their habitat, and the next, we’re online shopping and willfully turning our minds into Swiss cheese by scrolling through Twitter or Instagram. Or else we’re binge-watching Netflix shows about the zombie apocalypse that turn our terrors into entertainment, while tacitly confirming that the future ends in collapse anyway, so why bother trying to stop the inevitable? It also might explain the way serious people can simultaneously grasp how close we are to an irreversible tipping point and still regard the only people who are calling for this to be treated as an emergency as unserious and unrealistic.

Our appetite for political hobbyism, combined with technologies that prioritize knee-jerk hot takes and with laws placing congressional deliberations on live stream and giving members of Congress the ability to raise millions in response to viral-video grandstanding, does not serve us well.

How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV—the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time (The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, The Voice)—after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we to tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same? To watch the Twin Towers fall and on the same device in the same room then watch a marathon of Everybody Loves Raymond. To Netflix an episode of The Care Bears with your children, and then later that night (after the kids are in bed) search for amateur couples who’ve filmed themselves breaking the laws of several states. To videoconference from your work computer with Jan and Michael from the Akron office (about the new time-sheet protocols), then click (against your better instincts) on an embedded link to a jihadi beheading video. How do we separate these things in our brains when the experience of watching them—sitting or standing before the screen, perhaps eating a bowl of cereal, either alone or with others, but, in any case, always with part of us still rooted in our own daily slog (distracted by deadlines, trying to decide what to wear on a date later)—is the same? Watching, by definition, is different from doing.

A buyer persona profile is a short biography of the typical customer, not just a job description but a person description,” says Adele Revella,

The Chinese who mine cobalt mines in the Congo are now whipping Congolese workers with impunity. A video of this went viral, but no action group or government reacted to it.

Let's Rock!

Our children see how they are allowed in the best colleges, but only if they live in a neighborhood that has enough public school funding to help them get there. Our children see how once they get into that college the curriculum will still teach and promote the history, culture, and politics that keep them oppressed. Our children are seeing their parents lose the homes they worked so hard to afford due to racist lending practices of banks who will never face consequences for their illegal deeds. Our children see how no matter how hard they work, no matter what they accomplish, they could still be in the next viral video as they are gunned down by a cop at a traffic stop. Our children see that, as the world is now, they have nothing to lose.

The truth is, there are plenty of negative sentiments all around and within us - anger, fear, discontent, distrust, sadness, suspicion, constant self-doubt...but perhaps more than anything, an ongoing apprehension. And existential angst. All these emotions are very much a part of our lives now. Even digital spaces have become primarily emotional spaces. The posts that go viral or the videos that are watched most widely are freighted with emotions. What is equally significant is how this creates a tendency, a habit of mind, that perpetuates itself through space and time.

After each video of a police killing goes viral, popular reforms go on tour: banning chokeholds, investing in community policing, diversifying departments—none of which would have saved Floyd or most other police victims.

The Internet promotes compulsive overconsumption not merely by providing increased access to drugs old and new, but also by suggesting behaviors that otherwise may never have occurred to us. Videos don’t just “go viral.” They’re literally contagious, hence the advent of the meme.

The word 'viral' is perfect at describing the contagious effect caused by the combination of human nature and technology. And, of course, it isn’t just videos and products and tweets that can be contagious. Emotions can be, too. A completely connected world has the potential to go mad, all at once.

For the first two or so years following the release of the iPad, it was common to see press reports and viral YouTube videos of infants and young children who would pick up an “analogue” magazine or book and try to “swipe” its nonexistent touchscreen. Today, those one-year-olds are eleven to twelve. A four-year-old in 2011 is now well on her way to adulthood.

The sun tried to shine through the clouds but its light was dimmed even in us; high noon approached. I looked outside through the tinted windows at the people promenading down Madison. Couples held hands, bankers squeezed through crowds of window shoppers late for their daily thieving but all of them, even the poor, seemed content with existence, some even seemed happy. Nearly everyone’s outer shell was delicate and gracious that at the end of it all, on the border of nonexistence, each and everyone was happy to be alive. Everyone carried their heads with a radiance past the space they occupied and glided through time like flamenco dancers in a studio as big as the planet. Everyone wore masks that hid their sorrow (either that or they were sincerely happy) or wore armor that lightened the burden on their shoulders. Worst of all, I could not detect ever a flicker of thought; brains mired behind viral images and videos of people making even greater fools of themselves than they already were. And as the greatest fool of them all, I walked among them, never having learned to don the mask of happiness.

The head of the initiative was the former CEO of a website that served as a repository of humorous images and videos optimized for social media virality—mostly cats doing improbable things, like riding robotic vacuum cleaners and getting stuck in hamburger buns. The website had raised nearly forty-two million dollars in venture capital. He would be working alongside another entrepreneur, a woman who had founded an on-demand housekeeping platform that had shut down amid a spate of lawsuits. The audacity was breathtaking.

Keeping the police videos from the public and the press - along with Judge Cahill’s gag order, and his decisions and instructions about the body cam videos - allowed [Attorney General] Ellison and the prosecution to maintain control of the narrative. It might seem obvious now: without the police videos, there was nothing to compare to the viral Facebook video. Since there was no basis for comparison, the viral Facebook video - and freeze-frame screenshots that were used extensively by the media and the Left - were etched into the collective memory of just about everyone in America.

The theory of the long tail as popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name is that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of major hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. 5

How is it, then, that Infinite Jest still feels so transcendently, electrically alive? Theory one: as a novel about an “entertainment” weaponized to enslave and destroy all who look upon it, Infinite Jest is the first great Internet novel. Yes, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson may have gotten there first with Neuromancer and Snow Crash, whose Matrix and Metaverse, respectively, more accurately surmised what the Internet would look and feel like. (Wallace, among other things, failed to anticipate the break from cartridge- and disc-based entertainment.) But Infinite Jest warned against the insidious virality of popular entertainment long before anyone but the most Delphic philosophers of technology. Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram—Wallace somehow knew all this was coming, and it gave him (as the man himself might have put it) the howling fantods.

Kyle worked in technology; he knew it would only be a matter of time before the video of Daniela and the A-list actor went viral and spread everywhere. So he did what any pissed-off, red-blooded computer geek would do after catching his girlfriend giving an underwater blowjob to another man: he hacked into Twitter and deleted both the video and her earlier tweet from the site. Then, raging at the world that had devolved so much in civility that 140-character breakups had become acceptable, he shut down the entire network in a denial-of-service attack that lasted two days. And so began the Great Twitter Outage of 2011. The Earth nearly stopped on its axis. Panic and mayhem ensued as Twitter unsuccessfully attempted to counteract what it deemed the most sophisticated hijacking they’d ever experienced. Meanwhile, the FBI waited for either a ransom demand or political statement from the so-called “Twitter Terrorist.” But neither was forthcoming, as the Twitter Terrorist had no political agenda, already was worth millions, and had most inconveniently taken off to Tijuana, Mexico to get shit-faced drunk on cheap tequila being served by an eight-fingered bartender named Esteban.

It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals. I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film No Reservations made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick Mostly Martha.) On Hell’s Kitchen, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could ever stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on Gordon’s behalf. And he’s the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports. The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it. I wish, really, that I was so far up my own ass that I could somehow believe myself to be some kind of standard-bearer for good eating—or ombudsman, or even the deliverer of thoughtful critique. But that wouldn’t be true, would it? I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.” And I’m still angry. But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay? I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that’ll haunt me long after I’m crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed. Okay, I still would advise against the fish special at T.G.I. McSweenigan’s, “A Place for Beer,” on a Monday. Fresh fish, I’d guess, is probably not the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks. The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing. And even if he doesn’t, these days he has to figure that you might actually know the difference. Back when I wrote the book that changed my life, I was angriest—like a lot of chefs and cooks of my middling abilities—at my customers. They’ve changed. I’ve changed. About them, I’m not angry anymore.

When the pandemic started, most of the other medical practices in the Detroit area shut down, Dr. David Brownstein told me. “I had a meeting with my staff and my six partners. I told them, ‘We are going to stay open and treat COVID.’ They wanted to know how. I said, ‘We’ve been treating viral diseases here for twenty-five years. COVID can’t be any different.’ In all that time, our office had never lost a single patient to flu or flu-like illness. We treated people in their cars with oral vitamins A, C, and D, and iodine. We administered IV solution outside all winter with IV hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C. We’d have them put their butts out the car window and shot them up with intramuscular ozone. We nebulized them with hydrogen peroxide and Lugol’s iodine. We only rarely used ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. We treated 715 patients and had ten hospitalizations and no deaths. Early treatment was the key. We weren’t allowed to talk about it. The whole medical establishment was trying to shut down early treatment and silence all the doctors who talked about successes. A whole generation of doctors just stopped practicing medicine. When we talked about it, the whole cartel came for us. I’ve been in litigation with the Medical Board for a year. When we posted videos from some of our recovered patients, they went viral. One of the videos had a million views. FTC filed a motion against us, and we had to take everything down.” In July 2020, Brownstein and his seven colleagues published a peer-reviewed article describing their stellar success with early treatment. FTC sent him a letter warning him to take it down. “No one wanted Americans to know that you didn’t have to die from COVID. It’s 100 percent treatable,” says Dr. Brownstein. “We proved it. No one had to die.

I thought I saw you scurrying in here hubby-kins!” A girl in a vivid orange dress stepped into the room and I had to look up at her towering height and shoulders which nearly matched the breadth of the Heirs'. Her teeth protruded a little from her lower jaw and her eyes seemed to wander, never landing on one spot. Her hair was a massive brown frizz with a pink bow clipped into the top of it, perfectly matching the violently bright shade of her eyeshadow. She marched between Tory and I like we were made of paper, forcing us aside with her elbows as she charted a direct path for Darius. “Mildred,” he said tersely, his eyes darkening as his bride-to-be reached out to him. Caleb, Seth and Max sniggered as Mildred leaned in for a kiss and Darius only managed to stop her at the last second by planting his palm on her forehead with a loud clap. “Not before the wedding,” he said firmly and I looked at Tory who was falling into a fit of silent laughter, clutching her side. I tried to smother the giggle that fought its way out of my chest but it floated free and Mildred rounded on us like a hungry animal. “These must be the Vega Twins,” she said coldly. “Well don't waste your time sniffing around my snookums. Daddy says he's saving himself for our wedding night.” Max roared with laughter and Mildred turned on him like a loaded weapon, jabbing him right in the chest. Max's smile fell away as she glared at him like he was her next meal. “What are you laughing at you overgrown starfish?” she demanded, her eyes flashing red and her pupils turning to slits. “I've eaten bigger bites than you before, so don't tempt me because I adore seafood.” Max reached out, laying a hand on her bare arm, shifting it slightly as his fingers brushed a hairy mole. “Calm down Milly, we're just having a bit of fun. We want to get to know Darius's betrothed. Why don't you have a shot?” He nodded to Caleb who promptly picked one up and held it one out for Mildred to take. “Daddy says drinking will grow hairs on my chest,” she said, refusing it. “Too late for that,” Seth said under his breath and the others started laughing. A knot of sympathy tugged at my gut, but Mildred didn't seem to care about their mocking. She stepped toward Seth with a wicked grin and his smile fell away. “Oh and what's wrong with that exactly, Seth Capella? You like your girls hairy, don't you?” Seth gawped at her in answer. “What the hell does that mean?” “You like mutt muff,” she answered, jutting out her chin and I noticed a few wiry hairs protruding from it. Seth growled, scratching his stomach as he stepped forward. “I don't screw girls in their Order form, idiot.” “Maybe not, but you do, don't you Caleb Altair?” She rounded on him and now I was really starting to warm to Mildred as she cut them all down to size. I settled in for the show, folding my arms and smiling as I waited for her to go on. “My sister's boyfriend’s cousin said you like Pegasus butts. He even sent a video to Aurora Academy of you humping a Pegasex blow up doll and it went viral within a day.” Caleb's mouth fell open and his face paled in horror. “I didn't hump it!” “I didn't watch the video, but everyone told me what was in it. Why would I want to see you screwing a plastic horse?” She shrugged then turned to Tory and I with absolutely no kindness in her eyes. Oh crap.(Darcy)

Old Spice: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like viral video

You might have seen a viral video on Jimmy Kimmel Live of street interviews in which a prankster presented Trump’s policy positions as Hillary Clinton’s policies and asked her supporters if they agreed with those positions.3 Lots of people said they did. I’ll take it one step further by saying Trump would have won the election even if he and Clinton had switched positions and erased our memories of their old opinions. It literally didn’t matter what policies either person brought to the table. People made up their minds based on biases alone.

If you had an Internet connection and lived in North America at the time, you may have seen it. Vasquez is the man behind the “Double Rainbow” video, which at last check had 38 million views. In the clip, Vasquez pans his camera back and forth to show twin rainbows he’d discovered outside his house, first whispering in awe, then escalating in volume and emotion as he’s swept away in the moment. He hoots with delight, monologues about the rainbows’ beauty, sobs, and eventually waxes existential. “What does it mean?” Vasquez crows into the camera toward the end of the clip, voice filled with tears of sheer joy, marveling at rainbows like no man ever has or probably ever will again. It’s hard to watch without cracking up. That same month, the viral blog BuzzFeed boosted a different YouTuber’s visibility. Michelle Phan, a 23-year-old Vietnamese American makeup artist, posted a home video tutorial about how to apply makeup to re-create music star Lady Gaga’s look from the recently popular music video “Bad Romance.” BuzzFeed gushed, its followers shared, and Lady Gaga’s massive fanbase caught wind of the young Asian girl who taught you how to transform into Gaga. Once again, the Internet took the video and ran with it. Phan’s clip eventually clocked in at roughly the same number of views as “Double Rainbow.” These two YouTube sensations shared a spotlight in the same summer. Tens of millions of people watched them, because of a couple of superconnectors. So where are Vasquez and Phan now? Bear Vasquez has posted more than 1,300 videos now, inspired by the runaway success of “Double Rainbow.” But most of them have been completely ignored. After Kimmel and the subsequent media flurry, Vasquez spent the next few years trying to recapture the magic—and inadvertent comedy—of that moment. But his monologues about wild turkeys or clips of himself swimming in lakes just don’t seem to find their way to the chuckling masses like “Double Rainbow” did. He sells “Double Rainbow” T-shirts. And wears them. Today, Michelle Phan is widely considered the cosmetic queen of the Internet, and is the second-most-watched female YouTuber in the world. Her videos have a collective 800 million views. She amassed 5 million YouTube subscribers, and became the official video makeup artist for Lancôme, one of the largest cosmetics brands in the world. Phan has since founded the beauty-sample delivery company Ipsy.com, which has more than 150,000 paying subscribers, and created her own line of Sephora cosmetics. She continues to run her video business—now a full-blown production company—which has brought in millions of dollars from advertising. She’s shot to the top of a hypercompetitive industry at an improbably young age. And she’s still climbing. Bear Vasquez is still cheerful. But he’s not been able to capitalize on his one-time success. Michelle Phan could be the next Estée Lauder. This chapter is about what she did differently.

There was this feeling that you got when your video went viral. Like people were going to start asking for your autograph or panties. Like they were going to start sending you marriage proposals or death threats. Like you were going to be famous or at least internet famous. It started around a million hits. By ten million, you were buying bulk packs of panties to sell on iBuy.

What news do political junkies demand? Outrage and gossip. Why? Because it’s alluring. What news do we avoid? Local news. Why? It’s boring. What do we think of our partisan opponents? We hate them. Do we really hate them? No, but politics is more fun if we root for a team and spew anger at the other side. It’s easier to hate and dismiss the other side than to empathize and connect to them. When do we vote? When there’s a spectacle. When do we click? When politics can be a frivolous distraction. When do we donate? When there’ a cocktail party or a viral video. What are we doing? We’re taking actions not to empower our political values, but to satisfy our passion for the sport of politics.

Even if a song is very popular or a video has gone viral, if I know it is something I do not want to be stuck in my head, I just do not listen. I guard my heart.

one guy emerged from the MAGA crowd and stood between the battering ram and the door and started giving the speech of his life. He said he knew how angry they felt because he’d “been fired from every job he ever had, because he was a white guy,” but this wasn’t the way. He promised they could build a better future full of equality for all humans, and aliens too, but they had to back down and stop attacking the building. And that pocket of the crowd listened to him and they did back down. The man who showed me the video lamented that it was so dramatic it would surely go viral, but he couldn’t post it anywhere because everybody in it would wind up in jail. me: I think I saw that. Did you witness any, like, other altercations between the police and the protesters? Instant Replay: Other than what I saw up here? No, I mean, I saw that, saw them hitting that one girl with uh, uh, that billy club, whatever that thing is that they have.

Some things in life are beyond our control. When we are in that situation, we feel overwhelmed as we try everything in our power to control it. But that is useless! The founders of WhatsApp did not get jobs at Twitter and Facebook when they applied, which worked out in their favour in the future. Hence, what we see as bad at one point in time can turn out to be the best thing to happen to us. Just as I could not control the virality of my ‘out-of-context’ video, similarly there are many situations in life that are out of our control. Think: Is this in my control? If yes, you can do something about it. If no, then you cannot do anything about it. Therefore, in both circumstances, why worry?

Hard work is an overrated concept, a 30-second viral video makes you more famous than 10 years of hard work in theater. Historically, Who has been the most hardworking? Farmers right. Who commits the maximum number of suicides due to poverty? Farmers.

It was like one of those viral videos when a soldier comes home from war and his German shepherd just absolutely loses her shit in disbelief. That’s why we like living with animals so much; they exhibit their joy so outwardly, remind us how to be better alive.

Andrei avoided the internet as well and this evasion only added to his gloom. He loved music, especially old songs, and he loved movies, of all sorts. If he had the patience, sometimes he would read. While most of the pages he turned bored him to sleep, certain books with certain lines disarranged him. Some literature brought him to his feet, laughing and howling in his room. When the book was right, it was bliss and he wept. His room hushed with serenity and indebtedness. When he turned to his computer, however, or took out his phone, he would inevitably come across a viral trend or video that took the art he loved and turned it into a joke. The internet, in Andrei’s desperate eyes, managed to make fun of everything serious. And if one did not laugh, they were not intelligent. The internet could not be slowed and no protest to criticize its exploitation of art could be made because recreations of art hid perfectly under the veneer of mockery and was thus, impenetrable. It was easy to use Chopin’s ‘Sonata No. 2’ for a quick laugh, to reduce the ‘Funeral March’ to background music. It was a sneaky way for a digital creator to be considered an artist—and parodying the classics made them appear cleverer than the original artist. Meanwhile, Andrei’s body had healed playing Chopin alone in his apartment. He would frailly replay movie moments, too, that he later found the world edited and ripped apart with its cheap teeth. And everyone ate the internet’s crumbs. This cruel derision was impossible to escape. But enough jokes, memes, and glam over someone’s precious source of life would eventually make a sensitive body numb. And Andrei was afraid of that. He needed his fountain of hope unblemished. For this reason, he escaped the internet’s claws and only surrendered to it for e-mails, navigation, and the weather.

With memes, clickbait, and viral videos bombarding our screens, it feels like we are stuck in a never-ending game of 'Who Can Shout the Loudest?

That morning, a Syrian refugee entered a park in Annecy, France, and stabbed several children. A brutal video of the attack quickly emerged and began spreading across Twitter. The few employees who remained on the gutted trust and safety team scrambled to remove it. In the past, when violent imagery went viral on Twitter, the company used a data matching tool to detect any tweets containing it and wiped them out all at once. But the employees discovered that the tool they relied on wasn’t working. When they investigated, they learned that it was one of the bits of code that engineers had torn out months earlier. The tool had mistakenly flagged an image of a SpaceX rocket launch, so Musk had ordered the entire system be killed.

around 2010 there was a series of innovations that fundamentally changed these services. First and foremost, in 2009, Facebook introduced the “like” button and Twitter introduced the “retweet” button. Both of these innovations were then widely copied by other platforms, making viral content dissemination possible. These innovations quantified the success of every post and incentivized users to craft each post for maximum spread, which sometimes meant making more extreme statements or expressing more anger and disgust.[8] At the same time, Facebook began using algorithmically curated news feeds, which motivated other platforms to join the race and curate content that would most successfully hook users. Push notifications were released in 2009, pinging users with notifications throughout the day. The app store brought new advertising-driven platforms to smartphones. Front-facing cameras (2010) made it easier to take photos and videos of oneself, and the rapid spread of high-speed internet (reaching 61% of American homes by January 2010[9]) made it easier for everyone to consume everything quickly.

there were 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions at the end of 2013—that's 96 cell phone subscriptions for every 100 people in the world, a greater percentage of people than have access to a toothbrush. So it's no surprise that, in order to reach the individuals who would be interested in their organizations, smart marketers everywhere have altered the way they think about marketing and PR.

In PR, it's not about clip books. It's about reaching our buyers.

Who are my readers? How do I reach them? What are their motivations? What are the problems I can help them solve? How can I entertain them and inform them at the same time? What content will compel them to purchase what I have to offer? To be successful, you need to do the same thing.

Persson did not create Minecraft because he wanted to create a billion-dollar company; he loved video games and kept his day job while developing it. When the game soared in popularity, he started a company, Mojang, with some of the profits, but kept it small, with just 12 employees. Even with zero dollars spent on marketing and no user instructions, Minecraft grew exponentially, flying past the 100 million registered user mark in 2014 based largely on word of mouth.2 Players shared user-generated extras like modifications (“mods”) and custom maps with each other, and the game caught on not only with children but their parents and even educators. Still, Persson avoided the valuation game, refusing an investment offer from former Facebook president Sean Parker. Finally, he and his co-founders sold Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, a fortune built on one man’s focus on creating something that people loved.3 On the other end of the spectrum is Zynga, one of the fastest startups ever to reach a $1 billion valuation.4 The social game developer had its first hit in 2009 with FarmVille. Next came Zynga’s partnership with Facebook that turned into a growth engine. The company began trading on the NASDAQ in December 2011 and had 253 million active users per month as late as the first quarter of 2013.5 Then the relationship with Facebook ended and the wheels started coming off. Flush with IPO cash, Zynga started exhibiting all the symptoms of ego-driven, grow-at-any-cost syndrome. They moved into a $228 million headquarters in San Francisco. They began hastily acquiring companies like NaturalMotion, Newtoy, and Area/Code. They infuriated customers by launching new games without sufficient testing and filling them with scripts that signed players up for unwanted subscriptions and services. When customer outrage went viral, instead of focusing on building better products, Zynga hired a behavioral psychologist to try to trick customers into loving its games.6 In a 2009 speech at Startup@Berkeley, CEO Mark Pincus said, “I funded [Zynga] myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away. I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which . . . I downloaded it once — I couldn’t get rid of it. We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business.”7 By the spring of 2016, Zynga had laid off about 18 percent of its workforce and its share price had declined from $14.50 in 2012 to about $2.50.

Therefore, with these celebrity wannabees, 1) popularity—or the appearance of it—can be measured by how many Facebook friends or Twitter followers one has managed to acquire; 2) fame—however fleeting—can be attained by many through appearing on reality television shows or in videos gone viral on YouTube; even 3) wealth—or the appearance of it—can be attained through the buying of expensive homes, cars, and various adult toys on relatively cheap credit; and, finally, 4) real power is admittedly harder to achieve but not beyond the grasp of those willing to sacrifice ethics and do whatever it takes to attain it. This fourth quality or possession is probably as it has always been, but having easier access to the other three may just put this one within the grasp of more, especially those undeserving of it or who would possibly misuse it. Thankfully, not everyone in this category craves or seeks power. But beware those who do.

Usually, it is a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain—from a tiny blog to Gawker to a website of a local news network to the Huffington Post to the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real.* Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I “leak” a document. Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that. Really, it can be anything, from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video. However the play starts, the end is the same: The economics of the Internet are exploited to change public perception—and sell product.

The industrial world of pipelines relies heavily on push. Consumers are accessed through specific marketing and communication channels that the business owns or pays for. In a world of scarcity, options were limited, and getting heard often sufficed to get marketers and their messages in front of consumers. In this environment, the traditional advertising and public relations industries focused almost solely on awareness creation—the classic technique for “pushing” a product or service into the consciousness of a potential customer. This model of marketing breaks down in the networked world, where access to marketing and communication channels is democratized—as illustrated, for example, by the viral global popularity of YouTube videos such as PSY’s “Gangnam Style” and Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” In this world of abundance—where both products and the messages about them are virtually unlimited—people are more distracted, as an endless array of competing options is only a click or a swipe away. Thus, creating awareness alone doesn’t drive adoption and usage, and pushing goods and services toward customers is no longer the key to success. Instead, those goods and services must be designed to be so attractive that they naturally pull customers into their orbit. Furthermore, for a platform business, user commitment and active usage, not sign-ups or acquisitions, are the true indicators of customer adoption. That’s why platforms must attract users by structuring incentives for participation—preferably incentives that are organically connected to the interactions made possible by the platform. Traditionally, the marketing function was divorced from the product. In network businesses, marketing needs to be baked into the platform.

Don’t get mad at me for asking this, but why do you like him? I mean, I know you guys have the autistic sibling thing in common, but that can’t be the whole story.” “It’s not.” I want to explain, but it’s not easy. “You know that viral video that everyone was into a few years ago? About the lion who gets reunited with the guy who raised him as a cub? And the lion, like, licks him and hugs him and plays with him? And it’s amazing?” She raises her eyebrows. “You saying David’s a lion?” “It’s just . . . it’s easy to get a dog to love you. But it’s a lot harder—​and cooler—​to get a lion to. Especially if you’re the only person he doesn’t attack.” “I hope there’s a sexual metaphor somewhere in this whole lion thing,” Sarah says. “Because, honestly, that’s the only reason that would actually make sense to me.” “I don’t think either of us has a problem with you leaping to that assumption,” I say with an exaggerated wink. “Seriously,” she says. “Calling him a lion . . . I have issues with this.” “It’s just a metaphor.” “I know. But I don’t want you to be involved with someone who could hurt you.” “He wouldn’t. Not ever. He thinks the world is a shitty place, but he also thinks I’m the best thing in it. Well, me and his brother.” “Great,” she says. “Now you’re making me jealous. I’m jealous of your relationship with David Fields. Could I be a bigger loser?” “I’m not even telling you the best parts.” “Good,” she says. “Spare me

Like all animals, our relationship to and with violence has played an essential role in our evolutionary history. Violence is at the heart of who we are as a species. It shaped our past, defines much of our present, and molds our future. It is found within all our mythologies and religions. It is front and center in our news and entertainment. Videos that feature it consistently go viral on social media. It is feared, desired, shamed, celebrated, glamorized, demonized, fetishized, idealized, romanticized, and, so very often, misunderstood.

In September, Dr. McCullough used his own money to create a YouTube video showing four slides from his peer-reviewed American Medical Association articles to teach doctors the miraculous benefits of early treatment with HCQ and other remedies. His video went viral, with hundreds of thousands of downloads; YouTube pulled it two days later.

Content Marketing. Although it is often coupled with SEO, content marketing relies solely on virality or on building an audience slowly over time, without the long-term benefit of organic search. This includes writing blog posts you hope will make it to the top of social news sites like Hacker News and Reddit and building a media brand alongside your product (something I recommend only for very well-funded companies). It also includes producing content to educate people at different steps in their funnel whom you already have permission to contact. Most people think of blog posts when you mention content marketing. However, content can include books, ebooks, audio (think podcasts), video (think YouTube), or even in-person courses that are given away to bring links, traffic, and leads and build credibility. Most founders start by producing the content themselves, then hire people to help with production later.

In a video that went viral on TikTok, a male argus pheasant displayed his dazzling plumage to a female, who seemed to look off to the side. Viewers laughed at her apparent disinterest, not knowing that she was looking right at him with her side-facing visual field.

The viral nature of these videos forced the media to cover stories that they’d normally ignore. We created our own echo chamber.

Besides, people’s attention span was rather short in this new digital age; there was always a new scandal or a viral video of a funny cat to focus the limelight on.

Oh, and I’m dependent on antianxiety meds, the only therapist I ever had died from a fall down a flight of stairs, and there’s a viral video of me losing my mind at a public event, taken just before my own arrest. I’m not what anyone would call a reliable witness.

My argument is straightforward. We should not allow the specter of urban violence—made more palpable with each news special and each viral video—to reify the notion of the "isolated" ghetto." That notion grows increasingly outmoded with each passing day. Instead, we should embrace the opportunities to reframe seemingly familiar narratives that...impede our understanding of how injury is experienced. [...] Attention to how multiple frameworks on the inner city collapse upon one another and become conflated will lead us to ask new questions: What are the ways in which the cell phone, in this instance, proves critical to disseminating images of (and frameworks about) gang violence?

As CEO of a tech company, I knew exactly why a digital version was “necessary” and the ill that fact boded. I did all I could to warn people that it signaled the potential end of human liberty. In a video that went viral, I explained that digital as opposed to paper “vaccine passports” could require endless “updates” to stay valid. How did I know this? Because a digital product can be made to shut off.

For good measure, he took off the guy’s steel-toed shoes since some brainiac had made a YouTube video about escaping from tie wraps using your shoelaces that had gone viral. Indy wasn’t taking any chances.

My Blooper Video Goes Viral

In time, that selfie would go viral, being especially popular with YouTube videos with titles like: Disturbing Last Photos.

I always thought the purpose of video club was to create something so off the chain that it goes viral and makes you famous. But that's not the point at all. The best thing about video club is the people you discover along the way.

At a key point in the letter James told his readers: “You do not have because you do not ask God” (4:2). Prayer makes a difference. Your prayer makes a difference. “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (5:16). One of the most successful advertising campaigns of recent years came from a regional airline in the US during the run-up to Christmas. They set up a “virtual Santa” in the departure lounge of a domestic flight. Passengers would scan their boarding pass, activating a screen featuring Santa (located somewhere else and with access to their flight details), who would then ask them what they wanted for Christmas before sending them on their way. Unbeknownst to the passengers, employees from the airline then went out to local malls to purchase and wrap the very things the passengers had asked for—everything from new socks to a widescreen TV. When the passengers arrived at their destination, their gifts arrived along with their luggage at the baggage belt. Many stood in disbelief when they realised what had happened. Needless to say, the video recording their reactions went viral, providing the airline with way more publicity and goodwill than a standard commercial would have generated. But after the warm glow from watching it subsided, I had one thought in my mind: The guy who only asked for socks must be kicking himself. Once he’d realised what had happened, surrounded by people with expensive cameras and tablets, he must have felt a little foolish clutching a pair of socks. If only he had known. If only he had asked. James does not want us to make the same mistake. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. It is real. Things actually happen. God answers. How foolish we are not to pray far more than we do. How foolish, at the end of the day, aware of all that we could have had, to be left clutching the equivalent of a pair of socks that we never even realised we would get. Not every Christian can be a great theologian, preacher, missionary or evangelist. But every Christian can be a great and effective pray-er.

Inside the White House, some aides nicknamed Barr “the Honey Badger,” a reference to a viral video in which a fearless badger climbs a tree to kill a snake, gets bitten by the snake, passes out, and then starts eating the slithering creature. “It was always going to be Barr’s show,” one Trump legal adviser said. “Even if we wanted to be a puppeteer, why would we risk it? Emmet was not going to let stupid decisions be made at the end of this game. We were not going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I lean backin my chair, wiping tears from my eyes. A logical part of my brain tells me I need to stop. But for some reason, I lack all self-control and don’t click away. Someone knocks on my office door, and I look up, prepared to hide behind my monitor if needbe. But it’s just Marissa, and I wave herin. “Oh my God,” she says and comes around to my desk. “Stop watching those clips of dogs greeting their owners after they come home from the military.” “But it’s so sweet!” “You have mascara dripping down yourface.” “I didn’t wear any today.” She hikes an eyebrow. “Then it’s yesterday’s leftover mascara.” I grab a tissue from my desk drawer. “That’s likely.” I wipe my eyes and close the viral video. “Did you come in here just to yell atme?

On the breezy morning of March 31, 2017, a group of seven black-masked anarchists approached the headquarters of the neofascist Golden Dawn party near the Greek capital’s Larissa Station, a central train stop in the densely populated working-class borough of Kolonos. Armed with sledgehammers, sticks, and road flares, many of them donned motorcycle helmets in anticipation of a fight with the far-right Golden Dawn members. But on this morning, they met no resistance. The anti-fascists quickly smashed the windows, and threw flares into the office. Messages lambasting the Golden Dawn were spray-painted on the door. According to some accounts, those inside the office, unprepared for a confrontation, quickly fled. Security footage of the incident emerged in the local media within hours and went viral on social media. In the video, taxis and other vehicles can be seen speeding past as a group of anarchists stayed back on the road to ensure they weren’t ambushed from behind. Within minutes, the group had smashed the windows of the office, battered the door, and left behind glass shards glimmering under the bright spring sky. Emanating from large holes, weblike cracks stretched across the window panes.

The viral video—four million views and counting—had been recorded on a tourist’s iPhone in Central Park. On the screen, Hester’s

parents do not rejoice in a nine-year-old drag queen being given a modelling contract with an LGBT fashion company and telling other children in a viral YouTube video, ‘If you wanna be a drag queen and your parents don’t let you, you need new parents.’45

It's easy for us to confuse real love for ourselves with narcissism or conceit, but I think they are very different. Instead of the hollowness narcissism is designed to conceal, I've seen that real love for myself comes from a sense of inner abundance or inner sufficiency. It comes from feeling whole, which is innate to us, hidden underneath our fears and cultural conditioning and self-judgments. So it's not going to take learning tennis or creating a video that goes viral or becoming a world-class chef to be worthy of love. Those are all great things, but we are worthy whether or not we accomplish them.

So I’m here because my sex-toy video went viral?” “That’s the worse sentence anyone’s ever said in my office, but yes,

In 2013, a twenty-nine-year-old aspiring film director named Stephen Parkhurst parodied the older generation’s take on Millennials in a video—Millennials: We Suck and We’re Sorry—that went viral, with over 3 million views and counting.2 In his script, Parkhurst cleverly combined an acknowledgment of Millennial behavior with a critique of the parents who raised them,

What’s KittyTube?” I asked. “It’s our internet channel to show our cat videos. A dozen years ago, a kind inventor gave cats a cat-to-human speech translator. Since then, we’ve been in control of our videos. We hire human camera operators and film editors and everything else.

I first discovered Ryan Daniel Moran when I saw his now-famous t-shirt in a viral video on Facebook. It read: Democrat Republican ENTREPRENEUR

Brian Wecht was born in New Jersey to an interfaith couple. His father ran an army-navy store and enjoyed going to Vegas to see Elvis and Sinatra. Brian loved school, especially math and science, but also loved jazz saxophone and piano. “A large part of my identity came from being a fat kid who was bullied through most of my childhood,” he said. “I remember just not having many friends.” Brian double majored in math and music and chose graduate school in jazz composition. But when his girlfriend moved to San Diego, he quit and enrolled in a theoretical physics program at UC San Diego. Six months later the relationship failed; six years later he earned a PhD. When he solved a longstanding open problem in string theory (“the exact superconformal R-symmetry of any 4d SCFT”), Brian became an international star and earned fellowships at MIT, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He secured an unimaginable job: a lifetime professorship in particle physics in London. He was set. Except. Brian never lost his interest in music. He met his wife while playing for an improv troupe. He started a comedic band with his friend Dan called Ninja Sex Party. “I was always afraid it was going to bite me in the ass during faculty interviews because I dressed up like a ninja and sang about dicks and boning.” By the time Brian got to London, the band’s videos were viral sensations. He cried on the phone with Dan: Should they try to turn their side gig into a living? Brian and his wife had a daughter by this point. The choice seemed absurd. “You can’t quit,” his physics adviser said. “You’re the only one of my students who got a job.” His wife was supportive but said she couldn’t decide for him. If I take the leap and it fails, he thought, I may be fucking up my entire future for this weird YouTube career. He also thought, If I don’t jump, I’ll look back when I’m seventy and say, “Fuck, I should have tried.” Finally, he decided: “I’d rather live with fear and failure than safety and regret.” Brian and his family moved to Los Angeles. When the band’s next album was released, Ninja Sex Party was featured on Conan, profiled in the Washington Post, and reached the top twenty-five on the Billboard charts. They went on a sold-out tour across the country, including the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas.

MUSLIM WOMEN are commanding audiences, cracking jokes, and forging careers as stand-up comics and entertainers. From viral videos to one-woman shows, we deploy humor to enlighten and illuminate, but more importantly, we use humor to experience joy. We laugh till we cry, till we pee, till we forget. We belly laugh to give ourselves the strength to smash the patriarchy, find a date, do the laundry, write a book, get out of bed. In a world that tries to laugh at us, Muslim women have turned the tables and weaponized an art form: Humor is our not-so-secret weapon, joy is our punchline.

2. Earned Triggers Earned triggers are free in that they can not be bought directly, but they often require investment in the form of time spent on public and media relations. Favorable press mentions, hot viral videos, and featured App Store placements are all effective ways to gain attention. Companies may be lulled into thinking that related downloads or sales spikes signal long-term success, yet awareness generated by earned triggers can be short-lived. For earned triggers to drive ongoing user acquisition, companies must keep their products in the limelight — a difficult and unpredictable task.

In May 2005, the same month that Cruise went on Oprah, the world of celebrity changed. Perez Hilton and the Huffington Post launched, with TMZ right behind them, and the rise of the gossip sites pressured the print tabloids to joining them in a 24-hour Internet frenzy. Camera phones finally outsold brick phones, turning civilians into paparazzi. YouTube was a week old, and for the first time a video could go viral overnight.

A weird thing happens when people watch a viral video. In catching up with a cultural touchstone, the clip everyone's talking about at the water cooler, we assume we're on top of the whole story. After all, we've seen what everyone else has seen. Whatever gets edited out isn't part of the conversation.

We live in a swipe-right, blip-span culture of clickbait, 140-character arguments, and thirty-second viral videos. It’s easy to get someone’s attention, but it’s almost impossible to keep it.

After pictures and videos from our date on Tuesday night went viral, the internet has seemingly blown up with people trying to uncover all of my dirty secrets, which means Kas’s too. I have nothing to hide, really, but I like to keep my private life private,

And then it happened. One of my TikToks, a video about very specific red flags in men, blew up. I declared that any man who calls The Wolf of Wall Street his favorite movie of all time, or who has an obsession with Tom Brady—not the Bucs or the Pats, just Tom Brady—should be jailed (a clear and obvious joke, but also … is it?). And it went viral.

In a video that went viral on TikTok, a male argus pheasant displayed his dazzling plumage to a female, who seemed to look off to the side. Viewers laughed at her apparent disinterest, not knowing that she was looking right at him with her side-facing visual field. A seal’s visual field is more similar to ours but with excellent coverage above its head and poor coverage below, presumably to spot fish silhouetted against the sky. A seal that swims upside down might look relaxed to a human observer, but is actually scanning the seafloor for food.