Internet virality can reward despised content as strongly as admired content

Evidence

The internet’s chaotic nature, however, ensured that virality wasn’t always a product of calculated campaigns. Hate clicks remained just as powerful as genuine admiration. On February 10, 2011, thirteen-year-old Rebecca Black uploaded the music video for “Friday,” a song her parents commissioned for $4,000 as a birthday present. The track, with its shrill vocals and banal lyrics—“Yesterday was Thursday / Today is Friday”—became an object of instant ridicule. Comedy Central’s Tosh.O turned it into a meme, and music blogger Lyndsey Parker observed that its popularity stemmed not from any redeeming qualities but because it was “so unbelievably BAD.” For a brief moment, Black’s “Friday” eclipsed even Bieber’s view counts, showing the internet’s power to elevate even the most reviled content into cultural phenomena. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 294

Categorization

• CANDY: Rebecca Black’s Friday eclipsing Bieber’s view counts via hate clicks is a fun, self-contained fact.
• XREF: connects to: Viral meme fame can be non-consensual, damaging, and unmanageable by the subject. — Crystal Abidin, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame…, 182; AOL’s seedy reputation probably accelerated rather than slowed its growth — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 713; Contagious media spreads fastest when stripped of all inessential content — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 949 (+6 more)