Absurdity as Product Strategy
“Let’s make a viral video!” chirps a starry-eyed marketer, as if it were Sunday.
People aren’t even that happy on Sundays.
The client, upon hearing the two magic words, nods fervently and announces his prompt verdict with outsized aplomb — “Let’s!”, as if on the cusp of world domination.
The man wonders contemptuously, “How difficult can it be to produce a ‘Gangnam style-like’ hit,”, referring to the runaway success of South Korean rapper, Psy, prancing on an imaginary horse. At last count, the music video had more than 2 billion views.
But you cannot plan for a viral video, can you?
By their nature, viral products are unpredictable and unexpected, like the financial ‘black swans’ described by Nicholas Taleb in his book of the same name. Since then, ‘black swans’ have been colloquially used to describe a whole range of phenomena, from the success of Facebook to well, anything that is unpredictable, unexpected, has gigantic consequences, and possesses this last criterion — it seems obvious in hindsight.
Now you ask yourself — viral videos and runaway successes shouldn’t be predictable right? If they are, then they should be replicable, as if experiments.
And maybe they are — maybe there is a correlation, and you can gradually accumulate a sort of oxymoronic “scientific sixth sense” for what works, after many, many iterations.
Indeed, some have taken that thought to great heights. In venture capital, where ten per cent of investee companies constitute 90 per cent of the returns, choosing the right products and teams are of utmost importance.
Premier Startup accelerator, Y Combinator (YC) for example, takes this approach to an extreme. The accelerator invests in about 65 companies twice a year trying to find big winners, slowly accumulating a core knowledge base of what works.
“…in purely financial terms, there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business,” wrote its founder Paul Graham.
Graham’s ‘cost of doing business’ really means the ‘cost of extracting marginal information’ from the new startups.
In other words, Y Combinator is machine learning applied to an organization.
Still it’s part art, part science.
Mr Client slumps into his chair, losing some of his initial visions of grandeur. “Why aren’t there more Gangnam Styles then if it were so simple?”
Other researchers have poured much effort into studying what kinds of content actually go viral, and what they found was content per se is secondary; what matters is how it makes people feel.
One study, conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania on articles from the New York Times, showed that content that makes people joyous and happy are more likely to garner shares than those that don’t. But anger trumps joy — content that infuses people with rage become more viral than those that bring joy. Alas, at the top of the heap is ‘awe’, and ‘amazement’.
The research also recommends it may be more beneficial to focus on crafting contagious content than reaching out to influencers.
Okay, so people want to share things that make their jaws drop, whether it’s Russians hanging off a 1,000 foot tower with one arm, musical prodigies tearing up their instruments, or pythons eating crocodiles. It seems there is a method to the madness.
In fact, some technology startups are building into their early products, some form of absurdity. These seemingly absurd products attract a following, and a load of press. After the ridicule dies down, the apparent silliness of their products suddenly turn into potential goldmines.
When the mobile application “Yo” was launched, the startup received what they wanted — ridicule, and truckloads of it. The application did only thing, it sent a “Yo” notification to your friends.
Then it raised US$1.2 million, and it stopped becoming a joke. But it really stopped becoming a joke when Silicon Valley royalty Marc Andreessen defended what the company is doing.
Yo is “an instance of ‘one-bit communication’ — a message with no content other than the fact that it exists. Yes or no. Yo or no yo,” tweeted Andreesen.
Other forms of one-bit communication are police sirens and taxicab roof indicator lights, said Andreessen.
So, clarity and absurdity around strict constraints work – remember Twitter?
And who can forget “BangWithFriends”. This application, whose functionality can be easily guessed, drew busloads of ridicule. If you cannot guess what the app does from its name, please stop reading and take a nap. Alternatively, you may use Google. Anyway, the app iterated and became “Down”. Still along the same lines, but nonetheless leveraging on how absurd its first product was.
Consider ‘Washboard’. This jolly bunch charged people US$14.99 to deliver to them US$10 in quarters, for laundry.
“Nearly 100 per cent of the internet thought Washboard was an absolutely absurd concept. I had a very difficult time convincing people the service was even real but we did have customers that were excited for it,” said its co-founder Caleb Brown, who shut the service down.
But it got a bunch of press and customers, and they learned some things. And maybe that is the point.
Sometimes though, it works and it still shuts down. Ask solo app developer Dong Nyguen of ‘Flappy Birds’. The application at its peak was making US$50,000 a day from in-app advertising.
So he did an absurd thing — he pulled it from the App Store. From then on, he became a celebrity. Now it would be terribly easy for him to leverage this fame for his next application – ‘Swing Copters’.
One of the biggest successes of late is SnapChat. At the time of its launch, there was a palpable sense that users wanted more privacy but despite this, a product such as SnapChat went against the grain of contemporary thought.
The absurdity of SnapChat was of course in what it was known to be used for. I shall not mention what, but think Anthony Weiner. The other ‘absurdity’ was turning down Facebook’s US$3.2 billion buyout offer.
The media, of course, has a large part to play in all these. But again — no surprises — how viral products make people feel, and what drives views for online media, converge. This perfect alignment of incentives favours absurdity.
Absurdity garners page views. Page views sell ads, and ads pay salaries.
The master of this universe is Buzzfeed, which raised US$50 million last week, at a US$850 million valuation. The aggregator of lists has built a media empire by giving you everything you want. More, more and more. Be honest with yourself — the lists might as well be cocaine.
But for all the joy, disgust and wasted time these new-fangled toys bring to users, critics say this Age of Absurdity represents the destruction of things that matter – ‘proper’ journalism is being marginalised by an insatiable push for linkbaits, referring to hyperlinks that have a misleading and sensationalist title.
Likewise, other critics such as early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, assert that investors are focusing too much on software that don’t have a significant impact on humanity’s future.
But before we diss the next absurd app, consider this: Buzzfeed is in fact now turning to producing serious investigative content, and you think to yourself – “Wow! I thought they only did silly, trashy content.”
Now you see the trend? Absurdity is a means to an end. It is a product strategy now.
Squashing doubts in his head, the client musters up his courage and decides to go ahead.
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