Category: Marketing, viral
Learning Viral: The Leech Method
One of the best and most successful methods of implement viral is what I call the leech method. This is what has made some of the largest and most successful companies ever. How does it work? Great question.
Leech Method: This is creating a viral system on the back of a system that has a crap load of people.
link to photo
Examples:
- Paypal auto-inserts into eBay.
- Facebook apps on the back of Facebook
- Google being used to power Yahoo & AOL (Not really viral but leech method)
- YouTube creating video flash embeds on MySpace
- Slide creating instant bulletin posts on MySpace as well.
Currently, many sites encourage people to email their friends and with fingers-crossed those users may come to their site. The leech method goes to the most popular party in the city and starts infecting people there.
What are other sites still available to leech on?
Update: If you are interested in gaming you should check out Charles Hudson’s Social Gaming Summit. He even gave Okdork Readers 15% off.
Done reading? Subscribe to the RSS feed or leave a comment.
Submit your own quote and maybe you'll become part of the legend that is OkDork.
-
Noah Kagan wrote Learning Viral: The Leech Method on May 7th, 2008 and there are 7 comments. There will be one more after you add yours, though. Read more posts by Noah Kagan.
-
Want to subscribe?
Get new posts via email
-
-
Are you new? Get started here
This is Noah Kagan's premier site on online communities, marketing and fun business things.
It's for entrepreneurs, marketers, cubicle workers and people looking to kill 5 minutes.
First time here?
-
Popular Posts for May
Most Popular Posts...EVER!
Noah.licio.us
May's Top Commenters
- Nicole Price (3)
- Erik (3)
- MrAchievement.com (Stanle... (2)
- Yuval (2)
- Anand Chhatpar (2)
Think this site kicks ass? Find some more posts - browse the categories
Who is Noah Kagan?
Noah Kagan is a diarist. He likes to write about himself in third person and he enjoys writing about business. His ideas are the products of divine inspiration from Steve Jobs.
What is OkDork?
OkDork is Noah Kagan's blog. It is run on the sexiest blog platform around, WordPress. The blog design was done by Ben Bleikamp using XHTML, CSS, and Photoshop CS3.
7 Responses to “Learning Viral: The Leech Method”
May 7th, 2008
8:02 pm
Hey Noah,
Great seeing you at Plug and Play today! Mixbook is very much into the “leech” method for user acquisition - although I don’t know if I want to be known as a leech.
Andrew
May 8th, 2008
5:22 am
A lot of people are paying attention to Twitter these day.
MrAchievement
Stanley Bronstein
Attorney, CPA, Author, Blogger & Professional Motivational Speaker
May 8th, 2008
7:17 am
My only real reason for wanting to comment was a sort of OCD twitch I got. Call it attention to detail I don’t know. This was written by Noah on the 7th of May, and there are 1 comment. I’m a grammarian.
Hopefully now there is 2 comments.
May 8th, 2008
9:54 am
Craigslist has a lot of traffic that perhaps could be used to create an add-on social network on top.
May 8th, 2008
12:34 pm
Every site out there via widgets
Seriously - the whole widget fad is just this - leeching the long tail.
May 13th, 2008
12:02 am
I think Viral marketing is so fascinating that i really like reading all your posts about it. Thanks.
May 15th, 2008
6:53 pm
“Google being used to power Yahoo & AOL (Not really viral but leech method)”
Also one of the biggest blunders ever made by Yahoo;-)
That being said, viral products also have to have mass appeal to everyone. PayPal worked well with eBay because it solved a problem in their marketplace (immediate payments) that wasn’t addressed by their other solution (Billpoint).
Leave a Reply