That $40 'viral' photo booth filter app gave me 2 million views overnight

Last month I dropped $40 on one of those AI photo booth filters that was all over my feed, mostly as a joke because my sister kept sending me the silly results. I uploaded a pretty normal selfie of me holding a line cook special I made at home, and the app turned it into some wild neon cartoon version of me. That thing blew up on Reddit before I even woke up, and suddenly I was getting interviewed by a local food blog in Austin about my 'artistic vision.' I did not even post the original picture myself, my buddy threw it on his Insta with a dumb caption about kitchen chaos. The app itself was fine, but the real lesson was how random the whole thing is, I spent $40 and got a week of chaos while my actual cooking clips get like 12 views. Anyone else have a cheap silly purchase accidentally launch them into a weird mini-fame orbit?

1 comments

1 Comment

ray_miller4112d ago

Did you catch that piece on NPR about how the algorithm picks up stuff based on how fast people share it, not how good it is? Sounds like your buddy's caption hit some weird nerve with the foodie crowd, maybe they love the chaos angle. I read somewhere that most viral moments come from other people reposting, not the original creator, which is kinda messed up but also explains why your cooking clips sit at 12 views while a cartoon dog with a spatula gets 2 million. The whole thing reminds me of that guy who filmed his cat knocking over a fish tank and ended up on Ellen, pure accident. Forty bucks for a week of fame is cheap, but I bet the food blog interview was more about the story than the actual photo.