The Ledger
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Media companies can no longer run viable businesses purely on viral traffic
“You just can't run a proper company with viral traffic anymore. It doesn't translate.”
Broderick: The pandemic turned internet culture into mainstream culture in 2020
“Internet culture became culture in twenty-twenty. This is like the moment where, you know, Stephen Colbert is wearing AirPods and doing his TV show on Zoom from his bathtub. You know, the barriers broke down. Every family got a group chat that didn't have one.…”
TikTok's algorithm serves mainstream viral content directly without human aggregators
“They don't need aggregators. They don't need communities to surface things for them. It's kind of becoming it's, it feels counterintuitive, but essentially if you're a super normal person who likes really basic stuff like a blowjob joke or going to Costco, you…”
Mainstream internet virality recreates 90s local radio and America's Funniest Home Videos
“I would say that on the normie internet, the zinternet, you know, however you want to describe it, there are essentially two kinds of things that are constantly going viral. Stuff that local radio stations would talk about 30 years ago, and stuff that would be…”
Public viral content degrades as it becomes pure lead generation for paywalls
“So as paywalls have filled up the web, I think that has also changed the nature of what we're all seeing, which is that it's all getting lazier and sillier, because, and more provocative, because it's trying to get you to go behind the paywall.”