The Truth About Viral Content Creation

A long time ago, after I graduated from university, I decided that I wanted to become a writer. I figured out quickly that no one would pay me to write my short stories or books, so I needed to get a day job. Since I was useless at everything else, I decided to go into writing, because that was what I was good at, and I loved it. After interning at several places where many people decided to close their doors on me, I managed to land a job aggregating content. Or, as my boss called it, I was a content curator.

Warning: Post contains swears.

What a fucking pretentious job title.

So, at company X, all I did all day every day was look for interesting pieces of “news” related to my target audience, and then do a short write-up of four to five lines. Sometimes, it would go up to 11 lines if the story had a lot more detail. I was paid according to the amount of social media likes and shares, and later, hits. I liked my job and I still do, but I

• didn’t get to go out
• didn’t get to interact or interview people
• didn’t do jack except keep up with the hits because I got paid by the amount of hits.

And let me tell you, getting paid by hits sucks. It means you don’t have a fixed salary. It means that you have to constantly be in a mode where you keep saving all your money because you may get paid more one month and a lot less the next. Since I was technically a freelancer, I was not entitled to a fixed salary or benefits, although there was a maximum amount I could be paid, which I cannot disclose. Suffice to say, it’s not like that of a lawyer’s or an engineer’s because writers don’t get paid a lot.

It got up to a point where many of us were compromising the website’s voice because of content. We featured stories that were not related to the prime topics at hand because we knew that they would go viral, and that how much we were paid depended on how many hits were earned. Some of us tracked our stats obsessively because we were worried that we wouldn’t have enough money.

Then, the ads started coming in. Most of our readers would click on the links posted on our social media accounts, and they would see an ad before the article, and they would leave the website before looking at the article. Hits plummeted. We asked our boss many times to take out the ads, but he said no, because s/he needed the money, and s/he was all right with paying us less, duh.

Soon, I left the company, and went to work at company Y. I’d gotten restless at company X and interviewed at company Y because why the hell not? I got a job that was similar to my job, except I was writing about current events. This was something I’d wanted to try because I was interested in current events.

I soon realised that leaving for company Y was a mistake, because all my editor (who didn’t have a degree in journalism or whatever and was more of a businessman than a writer) told me to aggregate all those articles that would go VIRAL. Yes, s/he liked to type that word in caps, and s/he would make use of this to emphasise what he thought was important in online headlines. I was asked, repeatedly, to write about trashy tabloid stuff because people would read it, and I had to fight every single day to say, “No, it goes against my principles to put someone in misery in the spotlight for others to gawk at.” Some of these topics included covering a catfight between two women because one of them stole her fiancé, but I chose to forget the rest because remembering them made me angry.

I was also underestimated by one of the higher-ups in charge of this project, and s/he said that I wasn’t bad, for someone who was only required to write 4-5 lines per article at my old job. Prior to this statement, I found out that s/he also expressed doubt in my abilities because I wasn’t “trained” in writing longform content.

Bitch, I’ve been writing ever since I could hold a pencil. Up yours.

The kicker was this: I’d been asked to cover this sexist pick-up artist who was going to come to my country. I wrote the headline as a call-to-action, and asked people to petition so that he couldn’t enter. Instead, my editor inserted a screenshot of the pick-up artist pushing some woman’s head to his crotch, and sensationalised it with the headline with “XX pick-up artist pushes woman to his crotch,” or something like that.

What I’d hoped would rally people together to shut down a sexist piece of crap was now something out of The Daily Mail — this was not what I wanted at all. But who cares, right? Hits are the most important thing because you want to monetize the website by putting ads! And if more people read the website, they are more likely to click on ads! And if you have more ads, the people behind the ads will give you more money!

Now I am at company Z. I am back at print, and in some ways, it is worse to be there because no one is putting in money to buy ad space. People don’t read magazines anymore, they read stuff online. Magazines are thinner, and more room has to be made for ad space. Two weeks ago, I had to change the media kit to angle it to include more advertisers because we are apparently “isolating” people. It’s not my fault that our magazine targets the people who can shit out money every day, and that some people aren’t taking us up on the offer because they feel like they wouldn’t be targeting their demographic.

But who cares about integrity when you can have money, right?

Last Friday, my boss also insisted on buying 200,000 Facebook likes because we weren’t getting enough hits. No one wanted to advertise us with such a measly amount of likes and shares of Facebook. My editor and I are doing what we can to stop her, but s/he won’t listen.

None of my bosses have ever listened to me about editorial integrity. They have only wanted me to write what would go viral, and to use the keyboard to create content that would generate sales, not the truth.

The state of publishing and so-called journalism is shit. Everyone is scrambling for money. No one wants to pay for information because information is free on the internet! Instead, we have to look for advertisers. Advertisers want to get the word out because they have money made from selling a product — never mind if said product isn’t good, or doesn’t fit with the tone of the publication — we’ll run their ads and do whatever they want because we need the money.

It is unwise of me to write this entry, because you don’t bite the hand that gives you enough money to live off of, but I sometimes wonder if I really am a journalist or some phony at the bottom of the food chain, doing the work that comes out of these deals. Why try and write impartially when I am essentially an external vendor paid to market some company’s product? Why bother building an audience when you can buy likes?

Something has to change. People have to get used to paying for the content they want, or at least donate.

There has to be a way for people to pay journalists directly because they produce good, fair, and impartial content, so that journalists can uphold these ideals. Or maybe I am just shooting crap because it’s stupid and naive to hold onto one’s ideals, because they will get crushed by the practicalities of reality. If you are not a struggling writer, and can afford to pay for content, please consider paying writers for what they do if they have online donation boxes, or to their Patreon if they have one.

I don’t know what else to type here. I fight every single day for integrity, to build and audience organically, to try and present facts instead of fudging them up. What I do instead is sit in front of the computer and find a way to con someone with my words.

I give up.

Image from 401(K) 2012