My Article About Farting Went Viral and This Is What I Learned
Do I wish I wrote something more eloquent? Nah.
I’ll admit it. I’ve been trying to go viral on Medium for months. I’ve written advice columns, travel journals, heavily researched relationship pieces, science-driven health articles, current events. Nothing stuck.
Until I recently got a tiny taste of virality on Medium’s top relationship publication, P.S. I Love You.
With 6.5k views and $320 in a single week, the spike was both exciting and unexpected. My only apprehension? This semi-viral article was about farting on my boyfriend. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.
I could tell myself that I used farting as a clever metaphor for the comfortability that exists in healthy relationships — that the sooner the first fart comes the better — but the reality is that a fart is a fart. And farts just aren’t that eloquent.
It seemed like a harmless claim to make when my mother was the only person reading my articles. But now over 8,000 people know about the bottom-burp that instantly solidified my love for my partner.
The other unsettling thing about my meager Medium masterpiece is that there’s a typo in the title. In the bloody title. It wasn’t until I scored over 1k views in a single day that I thought to myself, is “cringy” even a word? Google’s dictionary immediately redirected me to “cringey.”
My palms began to sweat. Is it too late to change the title of an article on the rise? Will P.S. I Love You delete my only claim to fame if I try?
Turns out “cringey” is just as much not a word as “cringy.” Even now, the red snake of spelling shame slithers beneath both. “Cringeworthy” probably would have been my best bet, but I digress.
What I learned from my experience going semi-viral on Medium is that it doesn’t matter
Let’s tackle the embarrassing typo first. The story has ten responses. Not a single person has mentioned it. I also sent the article to multiple friends and family members when I published it in January. No one said a word.
You see it all the time: viral memes with typos or grammar mistakes. Our brains read what they want us to read. As Psychologist Tom Stafford stated in a Wired article, “We take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”
Remember the viral email chain that challenged us to read scrambled words?
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Nearly every fluent English speaker can read and understand the passage thanks to typoglycemia, the ability to read despite jumbled words.
In regards to the subject matter, the article was blunt and honest. While dense, it wasn’t necessarily serious and it didn’t take that long to write. It came from my heart (or some other bodily function). As opposed to other articles I’ve slaved over to meet curation guidelines and infuse data, this one was simply fun to write.
More importantly, going semi-viral didn’t matter either. Aside from some extra cash, I feel exactly the same as I did a week ago when I had never gone even slightly viral. In fact, going semi-viral only makes me want to go massive viral even more. I can already foresee an unhealthy addiction growing.
Are writers on Medium ever satisfied with their own stats? Or are they all striving for bigger exposure and more claps than the week before?
My main takeaway as a Medium writer is to be less critical, more genuine, and enjoy my craft
Medium readers are drawn to authority figures, but they also resonate with genuine, humble narrators who can laugh at themselves. I realize now that heavy lifting when it comes to research doesn’t guarantee going viral. In fact, in my experience, these science-backed articles haven’t performed half as well as the stories I wrote through personal experience. Citing statistics can strengthen an argument but it doesn’t always make for an engaging story.
My second most popular article to date is about my cousin who plays hard to get and the dating lessons I’ve learned from her carefree nature, and my third is a travel journal about what happened after I got in a stranger’s van in Australia. Inspirational stories, which use personal narrative to teach readers something useful, seem to perform the best on the Medium platform. As soon as I started being myself and writing articles that were genuine in regards to my own interests and experiences, readers related. Farts and all.