What’s going ‘viral’ worth?

By Jason van Genderen

I’m a storyteller. A commercials director. A documentary filmmaker. A short film repeat offender. Never in my life would I imagine ‘viral’ listed amongst my modest accolades.

April 2020. In a world gripped in the midst of a viral pandemic, crippling creative commerce and confining almost everyone to home isolation, I made a short home video documenting my family creating a home-supermarket for my 87-year-old mum, living with Alzheimers disease, and struggling to cope within the new ‘normal’. I spent the least amount of time on it. My 14 year old son captured it on my iPhone. I spent a few hours loosely condensing the experience into a 4 minute post  for my Facebook friends. I carried on my day not giving it another thought, posted it before crawling into bed and placed my phone on charge as I would any regular eve. I fell asleep. My 10-month-old stirred a few times, but the night was thankfully uneventful… or so I thought.

In the early hours of the morning, my phone kept buzzing with notifications. I sensibly ignored them. But the face-down screen pulsed with an un-easy frequency until dawn. When I awoke and glanced at my phone… I sensed an impending chaos was about to unleash on our quiet family life.

Within hours of posting my video, it had been shared tens of thousands of times, reached newsrooms and resulted in a barrage of messages and comments I couldn’t even navigate.

Now isn’t it strange that – as filmmakers – we build lifelong careers trying to connect with large global audiences yet here I am, in a completely unplanned paradigm, facing quite possibly the largest career opportunity of my life with absolutely zero understanding of how to make this moment count? My whole professional journey to date had been focused on shaping my storyteller voice, articulating stories that matter and developing an audience base. My most notable short film (to date) has amassed 1.2 million views on Youtube since September 2008. In just 6 short hours all that I thought I knew about finding audience ceased to matter.

The next three days became a blur. The Late Late Show with James Corden. Good Morning America. Then countless live news crosses, podcasts and radio interviews. 15,000,000 video views sure buys a lot of media attention – but how do you navigate this new territory when it’s so unexpected? What I want to share with you now is my experiences of how you can leverage the ‘virality’ opportunity and increase your exposure as a storyteller in the midst of its grip.

Firstly. Virality is far from an exact science. It’s very opportunity is conditional on a heady mix of timing, relevancy and uniqueness. You need to offer up a story that speaks to the ‘now’, the immediacy of life we’re all experiencing. It requires a universal language of connectivity… a relatable concept that transcends culture, age and class… it should prompt the viewer to nod their head within 10 seconds. Lastly, and most importantly, it needs to scream a story so individual that it begs to be shared. Because in the age of viral media, sharing is the only currency that matters.

And you’ll know if your story has ‘virality’ within the first few hours of publication. A simple measure is how many ‘shares’ it has as opposed to ‘comments’. For something to become viral, the urge for your audience to share it needs to be greater than the desire to place a comment or reaction to your post. If your video is consistently being shared 200% more than the comments it attracts, then that’s the first sign you’ve got a hot piece of content in your hands.

Media attention comes next. Approvals to share and requests to book interviews. Accept as many interviews as you feel comfortable with (it’s all great PR for your content). But be wary of letting other channels re-post your content natively. Encourage them to share from your original post, so the metrics come back to you.

Once your content clicks over a few million views, you’ll probably be approached by viral media aggregators. These are agencies that on-sell your content to broadcasters and larger social media channels. This presents your first real opportunity to monetise your content. Always insist on a ‘non-exclusive’ licensing agreement to keep your options open, and at a base you should negotiate a 50/50 revenue split. If your content is particularly hot, push for 60/40 revenue split.

One thing I would encourage is to work with licensing agencies that offer ‘live metrics’ on your content sales. The smarter social media aggregators offer sales stats and payments on a daily basis – this will keep you connected with the real-world impact and value of your story piece, and how to possibly replicate this on further content pieces.

And I say this with a degree of skepticism – as there’s currently no real way to independently track the reach of your viral media given that the tools for searching for video re-publishing online are not easily available. It remains a bit of an honesty-system. But be prepared to spend a few days tracking your video and keywords associated with it to see where it appears. Setting up some Google keyword searches will greatly assist this process as well.

So in summary, will a viral video make you rich? It depends on the lifespan of the message. A content piece that’s very ‘now’ may attract a few thousand dollars in a week of rapid sales, then drizzle away quietly into obscurity. A story piece with a longer lifespan, however, could create a steady income of $500-$1000 per month for as long as it’s share-worthy.

Therein lies the greatest irony in all this, and I only realised it when reflecting on the whole experience with a close industry friend. He asked me do I identify myself as a creator or as an artist? You could argue that the first creates to sell something, the second ultimately to express something. For me it’s a question I’m still pondering over. How would you class yourself, and how would you embrace a viral opportunity if one day you woke up to a constantly vibrating phone beside your bed?

Jason van Genderen is a Filmbreaker, Creative Agitator and Media Presenter. He is a father of three children and founder of content creation studio Treehouse Creative, the Pocket Film Academy and The Filmbreaker Movement. He has presented pocket film masterclasses for the Motion Picture Association in Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam.