Diply.com, a viral content site, is the 20th most popular site in the United States with 54 million monthly unique visitors. Globally, they have 120 million monthly unique visitors. This data comes from Quantcast, which directly measures the traffic at Diply.com.  According to a study by Compete.com, commissioned by Diply, Diply became the ”fastest growing website” in history last August.

So what’s going on? How did Diply—which sounds like a web 2.0 version of Dunkaroos—grow into a popular viral media site so rapidly? How does Diply work?
The short answer: influential social media accounts. They’re APlus on steroids, and EPO while throwing a deflated football.

Diply appears to have partnered with hundreds of influential social media accounts, primarily Facebook, but also other social networks such as Twitter and Google+.

Here’s the situation

1. Consistent production of viral content isn’t hard.  Viral content is still part art, part science, but there are more and more people out there who can consistently produce viral content. To help these people, there is a ton of data on viral content and good tools for navigating it, like BuzzSumo, NewsWhip, and CrowdTangle. Viral sites can learn from other sites and either embed viral content or (for the less ethically inclined) plagiarize it.

2. Facebook is the biggest social network. If you can get a post to do well on Facebook, then you can reach a large part of the world. Other social networks matter, but Facebook is the most important.

3. The content matters, but the source does not. If a random page shares an article you like, most people don’t care. Facebook’s business model is based on people liking content from random pages in their feed.

4. Facebook reach is hard. Even pages with hundreds of thousands of followers struggle to reach people.

5. If you want a post to reach a large number of people, the best way is to get a lot of influential pages sharing it

6. There are a large number of pages with a lot of likes that are looking for business opportunities. "I have x-million Facebook followers. How do I monetize it?"

7. Paying an influencer is worth the price. If paying Facebook pages to post your content is cheaper than Facebook ads and cost per click is less than the lifetime value from each user, then it is worth it. Alternatively, if acquiring a Facebook page is cheaper than Facebook ads, it is also worth it.

Given this situation, the strategy to get a large amount of Facebook traffic is simple: get a large number of influencers to post your content.

This practice doesn’t feel exactly right. This isn’t how Facebook was designed to work, and Facebook’s terms of service specify “Page names and Facebook Web Addresses must accurately reflect Page content. We may remove administrative rights or require you to change the Page name and Facebook Web Address for any Page that fails to meet this requirement.” and “Third-party advertisements on Pages are prohibited, without our prior permission.” Both of these are violated by a lot of these pages. That being said, Facebook doesn’t appear to be enforcing either term. If it actually prohibited third-party advertisements, it would interfere with the practices of a lot of celebrities promoting sponsors and, perhaps, even news organizations promoting sponsored content.   

1. Grow pages with a large amount of likes. Use your own content, random content, whatever works. Just get an audience. You can shift your focus later. People don’t care.

2. Buy pages with a large number of likes.

3. Partner with pages that have a large number of of likes. Posting sponsored content on users’ feeds is fundamental to a platform business model.  

However, their key viral tool is their partners. They have a lot of Facebook partners. Their partners aren’t limited to Facebook. They also partner with influencers on other social networks, including Twitter and Google+.

1. Diply.com

2. LittleThings.com

3. Dose.com

4. UpRoxx.com

5. ViralNova.com

6. TheChive.com

7. Bustle.com

8. MatterDome.com

9. APlus.com

I covered APlus previously.

10. ijReview.com

11. Distractify.com

12. TwentyWords.com

13. BroBible.com

14. Guff.com

This is just a small sampling of the sites doing this. The sample I used in this case is only 2000 Facebook pages. There are thousands of other influential sites out there. A quick Google search reveals additional sites working with Diply. If you look through any other influencers feeds, such as George Takei, you’ll find a lot of other sites that are partnering with influencers.