I Went Viral - 276

I went viral this past week. I walked into Walmart and saw that they were adding coin receptacles to their shopping carts. Pulling out my phone, I made a quick Tiktok video. After uploading the video to the service, I thought nothing more about it. Somehow, it attracted a lot of attention from the Tiktok community. Three days after I posted the video, it had 5 million views. A week after posting the video, it had amassed 10.5 million views and more than thirty thousand comments.

Going viral is an online phenomenon that any active Internet user is most likely already familiar with, at least to some extent. When the word viral is used to describe a video, it doesn’t refer to the type of content but rather to the way in which it gains popularity. A video goes viral by quickly amassing millions of views due to social media users sharing it with their friends and/or followers. And the more people share, the higher the number of views.

In short, a viral video is a video spread by users who share and like it, thus increasing its number of views and making it reach viewers outside the original target audience group. Due to the fact that sharing is a key element of creating viral content, it’s mainly encountered within the world of social media. When you manage to make your video go viral, there are really no limits as to how many people can actually watch it. A sensible assumption would be that the potential audience could even consist of as many people as there are users of a particular platform. This is, of course, only a theoretical scenario, but still, it’s not exactly accurate because viral posts and videos tend to travel between different social media platforms.

My viral video: https://www.tiktok.com/@soulforgepodcast/video/7192661184481430790

The Daily Dot article: https://www.dailydot.com/irl/walmart-dollar-shopping-cart/?fbclid=IwAR1oWtz6eZq9WblRCq8hDIP6VOHiVMAYoOZQeP3nFUCqoHySbeWfc7ssTJQ

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