Content Creator’s Food Guide to Viral Food and Gratification
What do you eat after your deep dive on why get why male heroes in comics don’t hoe no more goes viral?
When creating content, time is of the essence. A story breaks, and you gotta be ready to turn that camera on. You get the idea to talk about why male heroes in comics “Don’t hoe no more” with their fashion, and you wanna record it before someone else gets the same idea. OoOoOooOo boy, lemme tell you, the feel of instant gratification knowing you dropped your video at the right moment for it to hit? The dopamine goes so crazy that you gotta treat yourself with a treat. When that heat doesn’t hit? That’s when the comfort food comes in.
Now it becomes a different/dangerous game altogether if we correlate eating habits based on how well a video does. Let’s look at it like a scatter graph where the x-axis represents the number of views and the y-axis represents the level of gratification.
Low gratification - The booty call of snacks
Let’s say you are just starting out as a creator. You have 143 followers. You do a quick little dance trend. You look cute, hit every beat, nailed every move. You post it then, and wind up with 300 views. This is good; more than half of your followers have seen this. Obviously, you wanna go viral, but you should feel accomplished. Think of 300 views as a honey bun. Honey buns are sleeper agents, the booty calls of snacks; they know their role and give you instant satisfaction.
Oh, what’s this? After a few more dance trends, you’ve gained more followers, putting you at 400 people who like your content now. Now you’re a little more confident and decide to show more of your ass personality with some voice-over trends. You’re pulling scenes from your favorite shows like Abbott Elementary, Bob’s Burgers, Naruto, and The Suite Life of Zach and Cody (I said what I’ve said). Now you’re seeing that people share the same sense of humor you do; they enjoy your spin on these voice-overs. Your best video got 2,000 views. 2,000 is like a pepperoni pizza. Much like your idea, the pizza went into the oven as dough, just as your idea went into the matrix and fucking came out to be The One! This pepperoni piece of pizza poses as the perfect presentation of what a swift win looks like in the war against the algorithm.
Mid Gratification - Bring out the mink n' mac and cheese
Showcasing your voice-overs got you buzzing. Folks fuckin’ with your stuff so much that you got 5k followers now. Which has you thinking, you know what. I got some ideas. Matter of fact, you got some sketches you were thinking of shooting, and that’s exactly what you do. You DIY the props you need and go Ryan Coogler with the cinematic shots. You post, go to sleep, hoping it did well, then wake up to 100,000 views. Listen, 100K? That ain’t a snack bay-beeeeee. That’s an upscale meal. That’s lobster bisque with lobster mac and cheese, you understand me? This is “forget where you came from” food right here. You got a mink on while you’re eating the rich and creamy lobster sauce because you’re saucy now. Eight cheeses in that lobster mac and cheese, you ain’t gotta stop at three now. The cyber streets know your name, they know what you do. So you nom nom nom nom accordingly, ya heard.
High gratiftication - slam down the multi-course catfish extravaganza
You get an influx of followers, people rocking with your content. They like your ideas. You’re sitting at 60k followers now. What they don’t know is that you got a 5th-degree black belt in media literacy. You see folks talking about a show and missing a key point about a character. You can’t let that stand. You ride for this character, you’d die on the hill defending them. You have an opinion that defends this character; it’s an unpopular one, but you know it’s the right one. You’re willing to risk it all, and that’s what you do. You turn that camera on, and break down scene by scene why (insert character that doesn’t get the credit they deserve) needs more respect put on their name. You back your claims up with proof, evidence, and critical analysis. You dunno how this is going to go, but you’re going there. The internet is fickle, and people will turn on you, but to your surprise. Everyone is hearing you out, and they keep hearing you out, not just today but tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, till you find that you just did a video that hit over a million. Your take just went viral! You don’t know how you got here, you just know you kept it authentic. You dunno if you’ll ever be here again, so this meal— this meal is your last meal with this view on the horizon. This might be your last supper at the mountain top.
Which means for going viral, we’re talking blackened catfish, asparagus, mashed potatoes, and shrimp and grits. It ain’t going to get more G than this. It ain’t going to get more party in your mouth than this right here. The chefs are out of the kitchen and taking a seat to watch you slam this shit down. Somebody put on Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Ain’t no Mountain High Enough. You are stuffing your face with this good-good and watching the credits roll with your name in each roll. You savor every bite of this upscale eating because you don’t know if you’ll ever have it this good again, but you know you’ll be thankful for every meal that follows.