Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

But I’ve come to see that there is a separate wisdom in Lucas’s throwaway comment. The paradox of scale is that the biggest hits are often designed for a small, well-defined group of people. Star Wars was for children of a magical age—old enough to appreciate movies and young enough to love medieval histrionics in space without irony or embarrassment. Facebook was initially designed to appeal to the friends of Harvard undergrads, not to connect the whole world. Vince Forrest found that his bestselling buttons have the most amusingly strange and specific messages. Johannes Brahms wrote his world-famous lullaby for one mother. Narrowly tailored hits are more likely to succeed, perhaps both because of their inherent qualities—they are focused works—and because of their network qualities. People are more likely to talk about products and ideas that they feel unusually attached to. High school cliques, California cults, and ideological clusters are all defined by their differences from an outward mainstream. These groups have existed for a long time, but a digitally connected world of commerce means it is easier to profit from cultish hits—to be profitably “weird at scale.”