Rex Trulove
How many views of something before it becomes viral isn’t really defined and it can have a different meaning, depending on the media. However, I was totally stunned today to find out that an answer I wrote on Quora has been sent to five million people (5,000,000!)I can’t quite wrap my head around that.
The question I answered was ‘Why do cows have holes drilled in their sides, not buffaloes?” I’ve written about the same subject matter here on Virily, in a different way, but regarding treating cattle for bloat. Apparently, Quora determined that my answer was worthy of sending to millions of readers. I wrote the answer on September 26 and to date, it has had 289,100 views. To me, that would qualify as “viral”, regardless of how many more views it gets.
Frankly, I’m astonished. I wouldn’t have thought that so many people would be interested in the question in order to read the answer. The last time I had something that came close to being viral was back when I was a Senior Manager at Helium.com and I wrote about how to make a cheap swamp cooler. At least for that one, I could understand the overwhelming interest. Not so much with holes in cows. I just wish I was paid per view on Quora.
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Have you ever written something that went viral?
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Yes, a few times
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Yes, once
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No
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Not even close
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what is viral?
i have an article (Pizza Delivery Drone) that has to date more than 20 million views. So I guess my bar is high, and that is a bar I’ve only met a couple of times in the past 10 years.
That is definitely a lot of views! The article I mentioned here has received another 3,000 views since yesterday, too.
You are also right. There is no cut-and-dried definition of viral and it can mean different things on different media.
the platform is critical! I had a niume post that high 9000 views. It was huge for Niume. of course I have other posts that have 2 views 🙂
Yes , on twitter I have shared a picture which later became viral
A long time ago on a site that died Niume, I posted about a notorious serial killer. It was titled When the Devil Lived In Chicago about Holmes. People went crazy over the article and I kept getting comments and it pretty much blew all out of portion. So when this article no longer saw the light of day and the site went under I thought why not spiff it up and share it on Virily. I did that and I discovered that even though I had a fascination with serial killers no one else seemed to really care so it is sitting here on the site with several other such articles I wrote and I stopped writing about these criminals.
It is a little more difficult to get outside views here. Niume actively promoted the articles outside.
Some of my personal blog’s pages are on first google page.
placement in the Google search engine is deceiving and I really need to write about that to explain why.
I have before with my bluebirds and butterflies.
Super! How many views did you get?
Thousands is all I can remember.
It depends on what you mean by Viral! I have a post of HubPages, to do with the colonisation of Australia, that gets far more views than anything else. I also have several posts that are analyses of poems and which appear on the first page of a simple Google search.
However I suppose my photos on Google Maps are the closest to “virality”. I have around 2,200 at present, and the total views have just exceeded 50 million. The biggest number of views for a single photo is over 800,000. What a shame there’s no money involved!
That is great. I imagine that it helps to be used on Google.
I will feel astonished as well if I was you. It’s such a great things that your work being recognized by such lots of people.
I feel that way, though I don’t in any way feel that what I wrote is special.