Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
126
 www.ideavirus.com
Of course, sampling doesn’t always lead to the spreading of a virus, but without sampling,
you’ve got no chance, do you?

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
127
 www.ideavirus.com
How A Parody Of Star Wars Outsold Star Wars
According to USA Today, a parody called 
George Lucas In Love
is currently outselling the
new 
Star Wars
movie on video on Amazon. How is this possible? How can mighty
Twentieth Century Fox be beat by a nine-minute, $8 handmade film?
Because the parody is an ideavirus. And because the medium of the Net is the perfect place
for the word to spread.
In the old days, if you made a movie, you needed movie theaters across the country to show
it. That’s way outside the reach of an entrepreneur, regardless of how clever his movie is.
Videotape leveled the playing field a bit (Blockbuster can carry hundreds or thousands of
titles) but it’s still very difficult, time-consuming and expensive to force your way into
nationwide distribution.
But Amazon is a different story. Amazon prides itself on carrying just about everything. Since
they don’t have to carry much inventory, Amazon doesn’t take much of a risk by listing a
title. And the entrepreneur can certainly find his tape listed along with the thousands of
others available.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
128
 www.ideavirus.com
So distribution is the easy part. But how to spread the idea?
Well, the parody fills a vacuum. In this case, the vacuum was “funny and interesting news
about Star Wars.” Certainly, the launch of the videotape was a yawner, the mania about the
film version having largely subsided. Would many people buy the video for their libraries?
No doubt. But it wasn’t 
news
.
But now, here’s an email telling me that someone has seen the funniest little video. It’s
hysterical, my friend says. So I click on over to Amazon (using his affiliate link, I notice—he
may be a powerful sneezer, but he’s also making a profit on this virus). There, I note more
than 100 reviews, all of them positive. I see that it’s a bestseller. I realize that there’s almost
no risk here, certainly worth ten bucks and a few minutes of my time. I buy it.
And after I see it, I’ll tell five friends. This time using 
my
affiliate relationship.
A classic ideavirus. Yes, it would have grown faster if the filmmaker had just put the video
online for free, but he was stuck in the mindset of making money now. Yes, the charge and
the wait for shipping definitely slowed the virus down, but at the same time, it was a nice
balancing act—a slightly slower virus in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars (and
probably a contract for a real movie from a studio).
If it were me, I probably would have posted a low-resolution excerpt of some of the funny
parts online… it’s going to happen anyway, so the filmmaker might as well do it and thus
control what the sneezers say while also increasing the velocity of the virus.

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