Tim Dobson

Going viral: Luck of the draw

9 February 2013

2 min read

A while ago I blogged about how I had “discovered” a viral video.

I recently had an experience of just how life is serendipitous.

Ian / FollowTheFoot released a video which I thought was hilarious, and clearly worthy of more eyeballs, so I posted it to reddit to /r/videos and /r/travel.

Despite a few views in /r/travel, it flopped in /r/videos not succeeding in garnering any attention.

2 hours later, someone posted the same video, with the same title, again to /r/videos and front paged it.

I think this highlights several things:

  • that you win some, and lose some, and that life is not always “fair”, even if you were there first
  • the reason you failed may not be because you were wrong that the content was good
  • the first few initial votes on reddit are the most important to kicking it off
  • that it was clearly worth trying, as it was clearly deserving of extra eyeballs as I thought

Things like this, happen all the time through life:

When someone suggests an idea you originally tried a few months ago, and it works majestically for them.

That’s just the way it is, and the quicker you get over it, and realise that most of the time, it also works in your favour, the better!

Sometimes you'll win, sometimes you'll lose.
Sometimes you'll win, sometimes you'll lose.

Comments (1)

Ian

10 February 2013

Just gotta keep going! I’ve found one good thing of doing a video every week or so is you don’t have much time to sit and stew about this or that, you just gotta make something new, just keep it going. This has some downsides, but I’ve also been surprised by what takes off and what doesn’t, so it helps keeps those expectations in check too

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