Viral Content Quotes

That's the great thing about social media: you can make one move, and everybody knows about it, and I kind of like that.

Twitter can make a lot of things happen if you get enough retweets.

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

Somebody with a billion followers can tweet, 'See my movie,' and it can still tank. Followers don't always translate into success because I think people are too savvy. When something takes off, it's because people are connecting to it - not because someone with a lot of followers says to care about it.

I remember having 100 views on a video and being like, "I don't have a hundred friends." So that was a moment.

Vine is where 'Don't' started popping off. A lot of famous Viners used the song, and that was crazy because I had never been a part of something like that. I drank champagne for the first time when it got 100,000 plays.

The power of Twitter still never ceases to amaze me.

I've come across people referring to themselves as 'Vine famous.' Some of them started out by putting up Vines just for fun, then all of a sudden they get a bunch of fans, and a week later their Vines are totally different. They become obsessed with how their videos will be perceived.

Everytime I put a dance video out on social media, my fans love it, and the reaction I get online is mind blowing.

The traditional media never gave Bernie Sanders the time of day. But he went viral the same way hip-hop and new dances go viral. And I'm part of that culture.

Successful publication is all about the mix. What Buzzfeed discovered was that people like cat pictures. We can pretend to be embarrassed about that as a species, but it is actually a truth. So Buzzfeed publishes a lot of cat pictures. But they use the money from cat pictures to build an exceptional newsroom that publishes stories that far fewer people want to read, but it is very important journalism.

I've found my calling with Twitter. It's all about the amount of interaction you do, and the traffic you move, and I'm really good at that. I keep going and going and going, and no one can believe that I can keep it up.

4chan's culture is unique and spreads and draws people in like no other. It's also important to realize that 4chan wasn't some overnight success, and there was never 'hockey stick' - like growth.

You could have a zillion Facebook followers. Those people don't buy records. It's about a hundred to one...Record companies, they don't have any money, so they see social media as the free marketing... So... 'Billy, light yourself on fire and stand upside down, and that'll market the record.'

I don't hear any of the popular stuff unless it's good 'cause I pay no attention to popular culture, at all.

I have only become more popular since 'Race 3' memes.

Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube.

Negativity gets attention and gets clicks.

Founders always say, 'I'm going to 'make my thing go viral' - that doesn't mean just adding a share button.

I was doing Facebook comedy videos; then I moved over to Instagram, and then I hopped on Twitter. That is where I really was a master. That was the first place where I could go viral.

Lots of headless chickens running around - artists with 14 million followers on Twitter, some making millions, none making cultural impact.

On my posts, I would tell people, 'If you like this, give it a share.' If you go online and look at my videos, you might see where I have 80,000 likes, but 525,000 shares. That's where you gain more people as followers coming in. It took me a second to learn it all, but now that I have, it's been a blessing and a curse.

The videos I put on YouTube have expanded my audience beyond what I could have done at just a Hamburger Mary's. People saw the videos, started booking me, and literally 40-plus countries and thousands of gigs later I can basically say that YouTube has bought me a house.

OK, I wasn't really paying attention to YouTube in the year after it began. No one was. But its growth was remarkably rapid.

I've got 8 and 10 year old kids telling me about the match I had with Savage at WrestleMania III and that was 30 years before they were even born. But with the magic of the Internet, their dad tells them to watch a little bit of what they used to watch... It amazes me that we're passing it on from generation to generation.