Do You Have What it Takes to go Viral?
Every day on Medium there are at least a dozen articles with a title similar to this one! And then there’s a subheading with X number of things you can do to “make it so, #1”.
Or there’s a bunch of reasons listing why you have failed and shouldn’t be doing those things anymore. Again, usually with writing techniques or methods, you should use instead.
Poppycock!
Let’s unpack the whole “going viral” thing, shall we?
First, we need to actually define what “going viral” means.
Hmm, that’s not easy.
Suppose you’ve been writing for a while and the most number of reads any of your articles has had is 25 or 30. If you wrote one that got 10 times that — 250 to 300 — would that be viral for you?
Or you have a thousand+ followers and one of your articles gets 2000–3000 reads. Has that one gone viral?
Or you usually make a couple of hundred dollars a month and one month you make 4 figures. Or you usually make 4 figures and that month you made 5? Have you gone viral?
(I did. I usually make $4-$5 a month on Medium and one story netted me almost $50!)
The number of views on social media platforms is usually in the tens or hundreds of thousands before it’s declared truly viral.
Ok, I’m a retired scientist. Let’s do this “scientifically”.
Let’s look at a real virus, Sars-COV-var2 aka COVID-19.
What is the infection rate during this current pandemic? I live in Canada so let’s use Canada for this example. The rates will differ in other countries and local districts but Canada’s overall rate should fall in the general global range.
The population of Canada is 37.6 million (that’s close enough. We don’t need exact numbers here).
1.45 million Canadians are recorded as having contracted the COVID-19 virus.
So if we divide 1.45 by 37.6, we get 0.04 or 4% of the population has been infected.
4% of the population has gone viral from COVID!
Since that’s what a real virus does, let’s have some fun and use 4% as our number to determine whether an article we’ve written has gone viral.
Google tells me Medium has roughly 725,000 subscribers. So to go viral on Medium means you need to have been read or at least viewed by 4% of them, or 29,000!
29,000 readers!
That’s to have gone viral just to Medium’s paid subscribers. And there are lots of non-subscriber readers out there, too. (one estimate is 170 million unique users per month!)
Ok. Going back to our original figures, if you have 100 followers and 4 of them (that’s 4%!) have read your article, has it gone viral?
Technically, I'd say yes!
But emotionally? NO!
So what does it mean to have gone viral?
How many readers or views do you need to feel that your article or other social media post has gone viral?
As you can see, this whole idea of going viral is fraught with so many variables that essentially it doesn’t mean anything that can actually be measured.
If you’re ecstatic because you got WAY more reads for an article or post than you usually do, pat yourself on the back and consider that it has gone viral.
Because I’m going to suggest that “going viral” for us writers is the “emotional state” of feeling really good about what you’ve done.
Going viral is feeling really good about the content you created.
And you know what, you don’t even need a lot of external validation for that.
You’ve infected yourself with an emotional high, and that’s a virus we all wish we could get!
That’s my 2 cents, FWIW!
Til next time,
Rich
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