What Netflix can teach us about viral content

Uh-oh.

The client wants the impossible. Again.

This time, two of the goals for the project were:

I joined the team after the initial version of the hub had already been built. Only the platform was completely locked, kind of like Netflix—you could only access the content after you’d signed up.

A lot of content is published on the web every day—articles, podcasts, videos, social media posts, quizzes, and the list goes on. The problem is, only a small percentage of it ever reaches a substantial audience.

The issue isn’t in the quality of the content. If you look at your own analytics, you’ll notice that the epic amazing articles your team spent weeks on don’t always get the attention they deserve. On the surface, it may seem like a game of chance.

So, what is the problem then?

The answer is simple—the content needs to be, above all, discoverable.

On a normal website, users can share links to individual articles with their friend and; search engines can discover the content and add it to their search results. This is a free and automatic way of promoting your content, and it is the first and fundamental step in the journey to getting content to go viral.

When you introduce a locked system the content doesn’t exist to outside visitors anymore. In other words, the auto-promoting potential disappears.

You will have a much harder job promoting your resource hub if you want any engagement at all, and you can also wave goodbye to virality.

Netflix knows this—and they know how to harness the power of auto-promotion through Google and their users’ social sharing.

I’ll prove it to you:

Let’s do a little experiment. Open your browser in incognito mode and google “netflix ratched”. Ratched is a great show on Netflix that I really like.

You’ll notice that not only the show Ratched shows up in the search results, you can click on it and see that indeed, they have the show in their catalogue … you just need to sign up to watch it.

Many websites use this feature, which is called a “log-in wall”, for example the Guardian, The New York Times and Pinterest.

Now, log-in walls are not the perfect solution for all resource hubs.

In fact, they are considered bad UX by many and for a good reason—they interrupt the user’s journey. I’m sure you remember the last time you wanted to read the 6th article on The New Yorker ...

The user’s favourite experience is getting the content free of any cost —even if the cost is 1 minute of their time to sign up! But when we have certain organisational goals to consider, it might hit the sweet spot between the exclusivity of the content and its discoverability.