The Future of Internet Virality

Two warnings before we start. One: I’m going to be painting a grim picture of virality (things going viral on the internet). Two: I’m talking about the future, not the present. That grim picture is not here yet, but it could be in a few years.

I’m a science fiction writer, so my mind automatically looks at how things are going and imagines a future that could yet be. You can’t be 100% correct, and, truth is, usually you wouldn’t want to be. I hope I’m not correct in what I’m about to tell you. But trends in the high-tech and marketing industries being what they are, I’m afraid I am more right than I would comfortably admit on this topic.

Let’s have a fun exercise and look at the future of virality on the internet.

Everyone wants to go viral, right? If you own a business, you want to create that one YouTube video that tens of millions will look at and enjoy. If you’re a teenager, you want to create that TikTok viral video that will earn you hundreds of thousands of adoring fans and launch your singing/dancing career. The same goes for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. People want to launch careers, gain respect, get fame, earn money, win influence — you know the drill. We’ve been seeing this for two decades now.

There have been books and articles and research papers written about why things go viral. All of which are aimed at us, the regular people, who would like to find a hack, a shortcut into creating that one, two or twelve viral videos.

Before we consider the possible future, let’s take a look at one more element: The platform upon which every viral piece of content is built. Each platform has its own structure that translates into what people expect from it or get from it. Instagram will give you pictures or short videos at present. So if you want to create a viral article, go to Medium, not Instagram. You’ll need to fit to the specific mold of the platform and the specific expectations of users of that platform. The same person is looking for different things on LinkedIn than on Twitter and will react badly to content that doesn’t fit the nature of the platform. A tweet that gets retweeted 2 million times can’t be the video on YouTube that got 2 million views. It can’t be the same ‘content’.

The platforms are therefore an inherent part of the viral message. Viral message X needs platform Y to go viral. Remember that, because we’ll return to it later: Viral message X needs platform Y to go viral.

Now let’s start moving forward in time.

I’m looking in the mirror before hitting the gas and down the road into the future: How many platforms do we have today? A dozen or so serious ones and a couple dozen more serious wannabes. How much money does it take to create a platform? Hundreds of thousands of dollars, usually, and millions more for User Acquisition, which means getting to millions and millions of people to see then adopt the platform.

Okay. Hitting the gas now.

The more we travel into the future, the less costly it will become to create a platform. In the same way that in the very recent past building websites was expensive and getting storage was expensive, while at present these things are achieved cheaply and through automatic services — if we just look ten to twenty years into the future, there’s a good chance the tools for a team of two or three to build a good platform will be available for everyone’s use, cheaply. Anyone with a reasonable budget and access to users could perhaps even automate User Acquisition across various platforms and get millions of users to adopt the new platform, also pretty cheaply.

Suddenly, platforms are easy and fast to create with budgets that aren’t sky-high. But why should we care?

Getting on the highway now, as we move further into the future.

Imagine a company (let’s call it the Big Brother Company). It wants to become #1 and crush its competition. It figures out what viral messages it wants to send. It reverse engineers the platform it needs — one that has all the elements that would make those messages actually go viral. The Big Brother Company creates a special platform, uses user acquisition to bring on multitudes, and then starts releasing its messages virally to everyone.

Imagine a political party doing the same thing: Figuring out the ideal platform for its voters or potential voters, one that’s built as fuel to send all its important messages into the virality stratosphere — then building it and releasing it into the world.

Imagine country A that wants to ‘poison’ country B’s citizens with propaganda. It builds a platform, and uses it to launch the ideal viral videos.

So my guess-slash-prediction for the future is this: Since virality always uses its platform, once platforms become easy and cheap to create, platforms will be created by ad agencies, propagandists, political parties, parties with certain agendas as the ideal delivery system to create viral videos for its unsuspected users.

Platforms will become a tool for virality creation, and propaganda will have another glorious era.

Can’t wait.