Viral traffic – World’s first 100 Viral campaigns challenge

How fast can a new web company grow to 1M monthly visitors? Watch and learn from our live documented try.

Viral traffic – Can the secret to viral traffic be revealed?

Some think being viral is being lucky. Many individuals and companies put their best resources – money, time, thinking power, collaborations – everything, all in the purpose of creating viral traffic, while others endlessly pay for clicks and ads.

Many valuable initiatives could have been far more successful if they would just be better known to others – If they would crack the secret of going viral and generating high scale viral traffic.

The question is, can it be done and put to good usage, or is it just so much easier to gain viral traffic for some quiet cat video or someone falling in the weirdest way? And perhaps a far more important question is whether it can be done time and time again? Can we creak the secret of going viral? Can we generate well-planned predictable successes in that field? and if we can, will paying for clicks still take part in our world?

Time Economy’s short answer is:

• While luck can work for us, being viral is not necessarily being lucky – like any success it can be planned and achieved time and time again! Going viral once or twice could be luck, but generating consistent growth based on viral traffic time and time again is not being lucky – it is being smart and effective.

• The fundamentals of being viral are – exposing a deep truth, demonstrating sincerity, a clear visual original message, and some type of thrill or surprise. On top of all of the above, the about-to-be viral content must generate a burning need to share it with others. There are four good reasons for us to do that:
  • Value to others – The content offers a real significant undisputed value to others – a moment of lighter, a deep insight, a warning, an opportunity – anything that is a clear-cut win.
  • Social value – Sharing such content will provide us with social recognition or the gratitude of others.
  • Self-value – We will gain a good feeling by sharing it – knowing we had done something good, important, being excited from waiting for an unexpected response, etc.
  • A “no brainer” decision – We are required to minimal effort to consider whether to share the content, with who and in what manner. There are not too many complications for which we are aware of with sharing the content or if they are, they are negligible compared with the thrill and other benefits.

To make a long story short, when we are exposed to new content if it easily “rings a bell” of who the key audience of this content might be and at the same time it easily feels like we will have a big enough win from sharing that content with them – we will.

Can it be proven?

Science suggests two types of studies – retrospective and prospective. Retrospective studies include research in which the researcher collects existing data based on a scientific thesis he has to back it up with evidence. In this form of research, we could speculate for example that content offering a combination of deep truth, sincerity, the clear visual original message and some type of thrill or surprise would become viral. We could then review 10, 100, or 1,000 best viral traffic campaigns randomly selected with proper statistical representation, show that they all have these elements, and conclude that should we combine those elements of deep truth, some type of thrill, etc. we will have a viral traffic campaign.

Challenge is that there is much room for speculation in those retrospective studies as they tend to justify the reality in the way the researcher sees it and ignore other parameters. It could be that once such a researcher will try to generate a viral traffic campaign, he will realize it does not go viral because it is not funny or sexy and a viral campaign must also be one of the two or include some other critical component – such as being topical or at least include a cat in it…

Hence, a higher level of research (especially when it concerns human behavior or medicine) would be the prospective study. In this study, the researcher will have to speculate in advance which campaign would go viral and in advance – before its launch. In other words, the researcher will have to predict which campaign will generate viral traffic.

To do that in a scientifically acceptable manner, the scientist’s prediction must be based on a high enough statistical accuracy and strength.

Just expecting that one specific campaign will go viral and being right will count as simply being lucky. A decent researcher will have to create what is called a “control group”. A concept similar to A/B testing.

Should we generate 100 campaigns, predict that 50 of them will go viral and 50 will not and will be right in 80 percent of our prediction, it may be counted as valid based on appropriate statistical calculations and if the control group is properly designed.

Despite the huge importance and the vast amounts of money invested in marketing, viral traffic, and the strong will of going viral – a will that people these days are almost born with, up-to-date such study had never been done and the “secret” of going viral and creating viral traffic was yet to be revealed.

 Time Economy will pick up the gauntlet and take upon itself two challenges:

1. Openly speculating what makes staff go viral and generate 100 viral traffic campaigns while predicting in advance which of them will actually go viral as well as what would be the required conditions or chain of events for that and what could be done to enhance the chances of that happening.
2. Provide a suggestion to the control group of the 100 campaigns that will not generate viral traffic.

The results Time Economy wishes to achieve are:

1. Proof that a new operation can be planned and executed to generate a viral traffic campaign.
2. Show that a meaningful campaign with the true valuable offering, can become viral and positively impact the number of valuable campaigns while minimizing the less valuable campaigns, loss of resources, and human time.
3. Provide the data and framework that can be easily translated to a properly third party scientific partner that will be able to purchase the rights for the materials from Time Economy, manage the study independently on a non-English speaking audience that was not exposed to the campaign, and publicly publish its results for the benefit of all.

Register to Time Economy newsletter to follow our 100 viral campaigns progress and gain valuable insights!

Click the box below to join.