Derek Thompson tells a story. Well, actually, he tells a lot of stories. A senior editor at The Atlantic, the young writer has just published his first book, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction, and it's filled with stories. Chockablock with anecdotes. Stuffed to the gills with illustrative examples of this hit and that, this viral video and that, this successful startup and that. The book has goals in mind, theses it wants to arrive at, but first the reader has to wander through a thicket of tales about what achieved popularity and what did not.
Think of it like something from Dante. If you haven't followed the past five years of virality on YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook, Hit Makers will feel like the dark wood at the beginning of the Inferno. If you do have a sense of all the short-lived bursts of viral popularity, the book will feel instead like the Purgatorio: a chance to purge your memories of Rebecca Black's Friday, Miss Teen South Carolina, The Dress, What Does the Fox Say?, Rickrolling, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Honey Badger Don't Care—by understanding something about how and why these oddities clicked with a wide audience.
So, to get there, Thompson tells a story about music testing sites that survey large numbers of people to give a "catchiness score" to new songs before their recordings are released to radio stations and music publishers. And, he notes, the sites do a pretty good job at identifying the songs that people like enough to have a chance at being hits. Very few songs attain national popularity if they fail to achieve a good catchiness score.
The problem comes in the next step. Only around 5 percent of the songs that do get identified as potential hits then go on to become actual hits. There simply isn't enough space in popular music broadcasting, Thompson argues, for all 100 good-enough songs to find popularity. What he thinks most distinguishes the five percent of successes is the exposure those songs receive thanks to marketing and distribution. They get broadcast, he observes, where broadcast is his technical term for notice by websites and media outlets large enough to bring them to popular attention. They go viral, in popular language—although Thompson seems in Hit Makers to save viral for the rare things that bubble up into popularity without an initial broadcasting.
The distinction between the broadcast and the viral proves an interesting one. A very large number of Internet postings—on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al.—receive no repostings or clicks. Another large number do not spread beyond their posters' immediate circles. The never-clicked and the friends-only-clicked combine to be the vast majority; 95 percent of Internet postings never advance beyond the first circle of acquaintances, the first degree of separation.
So to achieve success, what's needed is usually a broadcast: an appearance on the Today show, for example, where the first circle of listeners numbers in the millions. An advertisement during the Super Bowl isn't viral simply because it had a hundred million viewers. It may simply have been broadcast to those hundred million and done a normal non-viral first-circle distribution from there. In terms of generating hit levels of popularity, would-be stars are a lot better off getting on the Tonight show than having all their friends click "like" on their YouTube videos.
In some sense, it was always thus. Thompson leans hard on the story of Claude Monet's paintings. Monet, in the telling of Hit Makers, was a good but not popular painter—until his Impressionist work was included in a bequest to the French nation. With his work shown at the Musée du Luxembourg, the French public became familiar with and then enthusiastic about Monet's talent. The bequest came to define Impressionism and the audience for it, in validation of some scientific research that suggests exposure can breed popularity.
The Monet tale is interesting, in part because Hit Makers tends to ignore the person-to-person, water-cooler ways of spreading opinions that people used before the Internet. But Thompson does have a strong thesis about what has the best chance of getting spread: catching the attention of the broadcasters and resonating with their audiences. He notes what he calls "optimal newness" as the key.
Creativity, in other words, is overrated. Examining the work of the industrial designer Raymond Loewy, Thompson argues that people don't actually want something new. They want something newish. "Loewy called his grand theory 'Most Advanced Yet Acceptable'—MAYA. He said to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising." The newness is necessary to excite interest, but the familiarity is necessary to give people a context in which to accept and appreciate the object's newness. In political terms, the worst mistake a politician can make is to get too far out ahead of his constituents. In artistic terms, artists find the path to unpopularity when they are too innovative. In engineering terms, products fail when they're so advanced that ordinary users can't figure out how to use them.
And yet, all that advice proves merely the equivalent of the music-testing sites that identify what could be a hit without identifying what will be a hit. Thompson claims that "the difference between a brilliant new idea with bad marketing and a mediocre idea with excellent marketing can be the difference between bankruptcy and success." But even the demand for good marketing is not quite enough to ensure success. For all that the word science appears in the subtitle of Hit Makers, science actually has little to do with popularity at the last and most crucial stage of translation into a hit. There are no surefire techniques—either in artistry or marketing—to achieve popularity.
Thompson aims in his writing to be more an aphorism maker than an image maker, as do nearly all who follow in Malcolm Gladwell's wake. But a visual image would help here, I think. Out on the Outer Banks—or, really, on any beach or sandy expanse where storms are common—lightning will strike the sand, fusing the quartz and other minerals into odd shapes known as fulgurites. And if you want to collect them, you can try setting up some rebar poles, small lightning rods, to catch the bolts and channel them down into the sand. But you can't predict which of the rods will succeed.
Lightning strikes where it will, in others words. A musician aiming at popularity is like a fulgurite collector. You put up your lightning rods where they have the best chance of being struck. You make them the size that has worked in the past. You put up the right number to maximize your chances without dissipating the electricity. You work hard. And then lightning strikes where it will.