I’m Not a Viral Writer. 

Andrea Ayres
3 min readJun 6, 2013

I hear the word “viral” at least five to ten times a day in my profession from any number of sources. ‘How to get viral’, ‘Be viral now,’ ‘The ten things you are doing wrong that are preventing you from achieving viral nirvana.’ There is an entire industry dedicated to teaching people how to write viral content.

For me, viral content is a Schrödinger’s Cat situation. Content I write may or may not be viral at any given time, but as soon as someone calls it “viral”—it ceases to be that very thing. I would spend half the day contemplating how to make a post viral with little success. I figured it was because I was simply missing something, so I went in search of what the experts had to say about what exactly viral was.

“It’s all just a formula.”

That’s what people told me in a reassuring manner, expecting that to somehow make me feel better. It didn’t.

What the formula amounts to is this; exploit human emotion. Play on their anger, joy, sadness, and envy. Pay homage to dominant social tropes while appearing to suggest you are dismantling them. Make them believe they are doing something by sharing the article. The resulting conclusion is that people are fools who can and deserve to be manipulated.

This is perhaps most apparent with breaking news. Breaking news stories have at least seven half-lives. Each successive story is less potent, until you are left with little more than a shadow of the original story. Take a hypothetical news story where fatalities are involved. Here’s how it would break down on the internet:

Breaking: These People Died! LIVE BLOG / LIVE UPDATES

Why You Should Care That These People Died / How Their Deaths Personally Affect You

10 Ways Their Deaths Could Have Been Prevented

25 Celebrity Tweets You Won’t Believe About Those Recently Deceased People

What Did the Sitting President Know and When Did he Know It?

Timeline of Events / Everything We Know About The Tragedy

What X Number of Companies are Doing in Response to the Tragedy

This Cat Will Help Make Us Feel Better About That One Tragedy From a While Back

As soon as you see it, you cannot unsee it. It’s not that I spent my life on the internet being naive to this. I just didn’t take the time I should have to analyze what this all meant for news or for those who read it. Now I watch as friends share these stories with a reckless abandon, often on the pretext of the title of the article alone. Are we all really so simple?

There are many websites out there who understand that they are simply a conduit for which to share links that may be of interest to people. They provide users with a highly curated experience which helps to create a loyal and active user base. I frequent these websites and have no problem with them. My problem stems from websites who masquerade viral posts as traditional journalism.

Viral content requires brevity, I’m talking less than 200 hundred words before providing the actual link or video. This formula renders the writer’s insight and skills useless. So much so that I started to question why my name would appear alongside this content that I did not help to create. How was it possible to receive credit for writing a summary of what people will see or hear in the provided link or video? The entire process made me feel like a scam artist, a middleman whose only purpose was to take something old and repackage it.

The worst part of it all is knowing that there are stories out there being ignored for the sake of covering viral content. I imagine my position replicated thousands of times over in news rooms, small offices, and co-op work spaces. Then I imagine all of the time we have collectively wasted reporting content that has already been reported on, instead of creating something new—something vital.

As of today, I will no longer waste my time trying to write viral content. I won’t participate in the needless decay of intellectual thought or cast aside nuanced arguments for the sake of shareability. Idealistic as it may be, I still believe in the art of writing and I want to devote myself to it.

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