The Rise of Viral Marketing
From Hotmail's free-email footer to the buzz behind The Blair Witch Project, a look at how viral marketing became a real strategy rather than an accident.
The term “viral marketing” is barely two years old, and it exists because of one product: Hotmail. When Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched the free web-based email service in 1996, their venture backer Steve Jurvetson suggested a small addition to every outgoing message: “Get your free email at Hotmail.” That one line turned every Hotmail user into a distributor. The service grew from zero to more than 12 million subscribers in about eighteen months, largely without traditional advertising, and Jurvetson coined the phrase “viral marketing” in a 1997 essay describing exactly why it worked.
The mechanic behind the term
What made Hotmail’s approach different from ordinary word-of-mouth was that the invitation was built into the product’s normal use. Every email sent was also, incidentally, an advertisement. That’s the core insight the phrase describes: growth that comes from a product feature rather than a media buy, spreading through existing social and professional networks instead of through paid impressions.
ICQ proved it wasn’t a one-off
ICQ, the instant messaging service launched by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, grew the same way. To talk to someone on ICQ, you needed them to have ICQ too, so users invited their contacts as a basic requirement of using the product, not as a marketing afterthought. America Online bought Mirabilis in 1998 for roughly $400 million, largely on the strength of a user base that grew almost entirely through this kind of built-in referral.
This summer showed a different kind of viral spread
The Blair Witch Project, a low-budget horror film that opened wide in July, built its audience mostly through an online following that started well before the film’s theatrical release. A website presenting the story’s premise as real found footage circulated through message boards and newsgroups, and the discussion about whether the footage was genuine did more to build anticipation than any conventional trailer campaign could have. It grossed roughly $140 million domestically against a production budget usually reported near $60,000, one of the most lopsided returns in film history, and it happened because people wanted to talk about it, not because a studio bought reach.
Two different mechanics, one underlying principle
Hotmail and ICQ show viral growth built into a product’s function. Blair Witch shows viral growth built into content compelling enough to discuss. Both rely on the same underlying force: people trust a recommendation from someone they know far more than they trust an ad, and a business that gives people a genuine reason to make that recommendation gets distribution no media budget can buy at the same price.
Where this goes from here
As 1999 closes, more businesses are trying to engineer this deliberately rather than stumble into it, and most of the attempts are clumsier than the originals. A forwarded joke email with a logo slapped on the bottom isn’t the same as Hotmail’s footer, because it doesn’t offer the recipient anything beyond the sender’s marketing message. The lesson from this year’s clearest successes is that the viral mechanic has to serve the person spreading it, not just the company hoping they will.
That distinction, between manufactured buzz and a product or story people want to pass along, is likely to separate the viral marketing case studies people still reference years from now from the ones nobody remembers trying.
