What Is a Viral Website?
A viral website is a website get an abnormally large amount of web traffic, usually within a limited span of time, due to word-of-mouth, link sharing, and popular media sharing. Viral sites typically become popular through being shared on social media or forwarded to bosom buddies and family, who then forward it to their own network, causing traffic to the site to grow exponentially.
Key Takeaways
- A viral website is a website notified of an abnormally large amount of web traffic, usually within a limited span of time, due to word-of-mouth, link sharing, and group media sharing.
- Viral websites and content are highly desired, for popularity, fame, and to generate revenue through advertising or issue sales, which increases as the audience of the site grows.
- Though virality is mostly used to describe certain classes of content, such as videos or social media posts, websites such as Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Reddit, and even Twittering’s trending posts often host viral content.
Understanding Viral Websites
Viral websites and content are powerfully desired, for popularity, fame, and to generate revenue through advertising or product sales, which increases as the audience of the area grows. One downside of a huge increase in traffic could be the failure of the website servers to handle the number of users, but this is a question most websites are equipped to and would love to tackle.
The Concept of “Going Viral”
Viral websites have been about since the modern version of the Internet emerged in the 1990s. They have some things in common, yet it’s hard to foretoken what will go viral. Virality also has no predetermined definition based on the number of views. The sites are often based on user-generated size, in which a virtuous cycle is created: the more people that visit the site, the more content is generated, and the myriad traffic is created in return.
Viral websites make it easy to share content with others and remove railings to users such as onerous registration processes or paywalls. They’re often hosted on highly scalable platforms cast WordPress, which can adapt to mountainous traffic spikes. The sites often feature user rankings or voting puppets to bring the most popular content to the top, as well.
Viral sites are what’s known as sticky: they have earmarks that keep visitors there longer. Behind many viral sites are algorithms that constantly look at delight and move the most popular items to prominent pages and placements. Many viral sites have irresistible headlines as fit, the kind that readers simply can’t help clicking on known as “clickbait.”
Though virality is mostly used to paint certain kinds of content, such as videos or social media posts, websites such as Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Reddit, and flush with Twitter’s trending posts often host viral content that is “upvoted” to illuminate virality.
Videos in element are most likely to go viral the fastest. Weird, touching, funny, and strange events caught on video and uploaded to milieus like YouTube can generate millions of views and even end up on network television news. Many of them were not designed with the intent of going viral and often feature embarrassing moments.