By Manufacturing Viral Videos, Magicians Made a Fortune on Facebook (economist.com) 22
Sociologist Ashley Mears know the secret to making viral videos on Facebook. "It's like a magic trick," one creator explains. Literally.
"Many of the most successful people in the content-creation game on Facebook are magicians," Mears explains in a video. "I think that that's not such a surprise, because magicians are extremely skilled in manipulating people's attention, which is basically what the viral video economy does."
Mears recently visited the "new creative elites," a group of creators regularly getting 100 million to 200 million views, which includes former jazz singer Anna Rothfuss and her magician boyfriend Justin Flom: Rothfuss and Flom are among the 180 video-makers (or "creators" in the industry's jargon) working with a Las Vegas magician called Rick Lax. They produce short videos timed to last the precise number of seconds that Facebook requires a clip to run to be eligible for an ad (this used to be three minutes but recently went down to one). Though the clips usually look like authentic user-generated material, all are scripted. Most fall into genres: diy, crafts, hazards, adultery and proposals. Lax manages his network like a cross between a Hollywood agent and a schoolteacher. He takes a slice of the ad revenue that creators earn. In exchange, he gives them online tutorials about how to make viral content: everything from how to hold the camera to which metrics matter to Facebook. He releases new instructions every time the algorithm changes substantially, and offers feedback on people's videos. He also posts his creators' videos on his own Facebook page, which has 14m followers....
A friend was making videos for Rick Lax, and invited Rothfuss to join in 2019. A year later she bought her first mansion. Entering the viral-content game involves a certain surrendering of artistic aspirations, but Rothfuss says she doesn't care. "I do not want to be famous," she says. "I love being low-key and flying under the radar, and just getting rich...."
Lax realised that appetite for these videos was insatiable: the only obstacle to earning more money was how many clips he could make in a day.... Lax wouldn't go into details of his profit-sharing arrangement but his creators are clearly flourishing. Many told me they felt like they were taking part in a 21st-century gold rush. "This doesn't happen to that many people," says Amy Boiss, a one-time Uber driver whose magician boyfriend introduced her to Lax's network. "To make more money than neurosurgeons...." Lax and his friends got rich without anyone knowing who they are....
It's perhaps no coincidence that the two most-viewed Facebook creators in 2021, Lax and Julius Dein, both started out as magicians (as did many of their affiliates). Their videos aren't magic performances as such, but they're informed by the art of magic. "Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception," wrote a former Google employee (and amateur magician) in an essay published on Medium in 2017, "How technology hijacks your mind". Social-media companies, wrote the author, "influence what people do without them even realising it", just as magicians do: "Once you know how to push people's buttons you can play them like a piano."
Ironically, the creators end up driven by "the same dopamine rush they were exploiting in us," the article points out. "If you're looking at the data, you can actually see your earnings go up as people watch your work: making viral videos can be just as addictive as watching them."
One of the magicians in Lax's network even says point-blank that "It feels like a drug."
"Many of the most successful people in the content-creation game on Facebook are magicians," Mears explains in a video. "I think that that's not such a surprise, because magicians are extremely skilled in manipulating people's attention, which is basically what the viral video economy does."
Mears recently visited the "new creative elites," a group of creators regularly getting 100 million to 200 million views, which includes former jazz singer Anna Rothfuss and her magician boyfriend Justin Flom: Rothfuss and Flom are among the 180 video-makers (or "creators" in the industry's jargon) working with a Las Vegas magician called Rick Lax. They produce short videos timed to last the precise number of seconds that Facebook requires a clip to run to be eligible for an ad (this used to be three minutes but recently went down to one). Though the clips usually look like authentic user-generated material, all are scripted. Most fall into genres: diy, crafts, hazards, adultery and proposals. Lax manages his network like a cross between a Hollywood agent and a schoolteacher. He takes a slice of the ad revenue that creators earn. In exchange, he gives them online tutorials about how to make viral content: everything from how to hold the camera to which metrics matter to Facebook. He releases new instructions every time the algorithm changes substantially, and offers feedback on people's videos. He also posts his creators' videos on his own Facebook page, which has 14m followers....
A friend was making videos for Rick Lax, and invited Rothfuss to join in 2019. A year later she bought her first mansion. Entering the viral-content game involves a certain surrendering of artistic aspirations, but Rothfuss says she doesn't care. "I do not want to be famous," she says. "I love being low-key and flying under the radar, and just getting rich...."
Lax realised that appetite for these videos was insatiable: the only obstacle to earning more money was how many clips he could make in a day.... Lax wouldn't go into details of his profit-sharing arrangement but his creators are clearly flourishing. Many told me they felt like they were taking part in a 21st-century gold rush. "This doesn't happen to that many people," says Amy Boiss, a one-time Uber driver whose magician boyfriend introduced her to Lax's network. "To make more money than neurosurgeons...." Lax and his friends got rich without anyone knowing who they are....
It's perhaps no coincidence that the two most-viewed Facebook creators in 2021, Lax and Julius Dein, both started out as magicians (as did many of their affiliates). Their videos aren't magic performances as such, but they're informed by the art of magic. "Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception," wrote a former Google employee (and amateur magician) in an essay published on Medium in 2017, "How technology hijacks your mind". Social-media companies, wrote the author, "influence what people do without them even realising it", just as magicians do: "Once you know how to push people's buttons you can play them like a piano."
Ironically, the creators end up driven by "the same dopamine rush they were exploiting in us," the article points out. "If you're looking at the data, you can actually see your earnings go up as people watch your work: making viral videos can be just as addictive as watching them."
One of the magicians in Lax's network even says point-blank that "It feels like a drug."
Question? (Score:2)
So, divide your informative/interesting video into one minute segments?
Or am I missing something (which I ca well believe)?
Re: (Score:2)
These are the new "shorts" that YouTube is heavily promoting to compete with TikTok eyeballs. If you open YouTube in private/incognito mode, it is the third row of suggested content and the suggestions I got had anywhere from 7 to 152 Million views. That's a lot of ad revenue for watching a 60-second clip on how to moonwalk.
Other people had a working algorithm long before this. The top four YouTubers, rounded to the nearest million followers:
1) PewDiePie . . . . . . . . 111M Subscribers
2) MrBeast . . . .
Re: (Score:1)
Other people had a working algorithm long before this. The top four YouTubers, rounded to the nearest million followers: 1) PewDiePie . . . . . . . . 111M Subscribers 2) MrBeast . . . . . . . . . . 101M Subscribers 3) Kids Diana Show . . . 100M Subscribers 4) Like Nastya . . . . . . . . 99M Subscribers
I've heard of #1 but not seen more than few seconds of his videos. Never heard of the rest.
Now I know for sure that I'm an old fart.
Executive Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an advertisement for Rick Lax, who sells his services as an advisor to people who try to make money off Facebook videos.
The only open question is whether he paid for the Economist story, or if he duped someone into writing it for free.
Really? (Score:2)
Given how much he's making, it doesn't seem like he needs a puff piece, and there's no obvious purpose in his getting such a puff piece; does he really need more clients?
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to be assuming that he doesn't want more money than he currently has. You also seem to be assuming that he doesn't care that the majority of people have absolutely no idea who he is. Additionally, you seem to be assuming that he and his clients are representing their level of wealth accurately.
I think it's much more likely that all of those assumptions are wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Really? (Score:3)
Money "feels like a drug" and we end up with wealth hoarding. Like a warehouse garage filled with expensive and classic cars that are rarely if at all driven and almost never seen by the public.
And this is bad for society as a whole.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you have hit the nail on the head.
Viral Video Economy (Score:1)
makes me pray for nuclear war with China. Fuck this rock.
Re: (Score:2)
From the article:
* He was rejected from his own show idea 'Wizard Wars"
* He spent over a year making largely ignored videos while perfecting a formula that worked.
Capitalism was about to slap him to the curb but he he bitch-slapped capitalism and found a way to make the money pour in.
Re: (Score:3)
Uh, no .. god damn some of you people are naïve, and it's funny, because you're naïve because you think you know something that all the naive people don't know. (Follow the money, man! *eyeroll*) This is an investigative piece, detailing a group of people, the things they are doing. The piece is not uncritical of their work. A purchased fluff piece wouldn't go with "Are they selling their souls?" in the subhead, let alone dig into the question in the piece.
Reporting that Lax sells his services isn
Steaks on a Plane (Score:2)
"It feels like a drug" (Score:2)
I would expect a crash in content creation because the dopamine release won't last forever. In fact it would be highly destructive if it did because the human body isn't built to handle a permanent dopamine high.
I hope they have another plan lined up for when this gravy train ends
They cheat (Score:2)
They use Magic.
insidious/genius (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of Flom's videos are just a minute of him or his crew *appearing* to be making something for one minute, and it involves things that make no sense. But human nature dictates that once you don't understand what's going on - for example why somebody would poor a quart of woodglue into a bowl of cornflakes and stir it with a drill - you need to find out what the ending is. The ending is nothing. It's junk. The ending is not the point. Keeping the viewer watching is. The videos are full on naked attention booby traps, and the brilliant thing is they require no content, and can be produced in bad faith in "plain view" because even when the user finds out it's nothing at the end, they'll watch another one. Even if many people skip to the end, and even if many people "learn" never to watch another Flom video again, the metrics of millions of people dictates enough will watch the entire video and trigger the ad roll, and enough will watch the next one Facebook serves them in an hour or so.
His videos are the best example of how to demonstrate that despite most of us thinking we have free will, in broad terms, human psychology is so utterly exploitable at scale that the reason for regulation in media is indisputable - and that it hasn't yet caught up with platforms that allow people to produce content who are operating on a level of calculated bad faith never seen before.
Ho hum. (Score:2)
The reason anything goes viral is because of recommendation algorithms' positive feedback loops. The only question is the relative size of gain vs damping.
Facebook (Score:1)