No one knows if it was intentional or accidental, but how could a man be so handsome, instantly becoming the hottest topic online?
And Third Rate Extra also ushered in the first peak of his life.
Within an hour of uploading, his video had achieved an astonishing 300,000 views. It was then directly recommended to the homepage by Facebook as featured content for promotion.
It's important to clarify something here: unlike the increasing number of positions on the Facebook homepage that can be purchased with advertising fees, "Homepage Hot" always occupies the most prominent and non-purchasable recommendation spot on the Facebook homepage.
This recommendation is only granted after content has garnered a large amount of spontaneous user clicks in a short period, and after review personnel have determined that the content is genuinely high-quality and worthy of being recommended to all users.
How important is this position?
Even content of very poor quality, if it stays on the Homepage Hot for an hour, is guaranteed to receive over 2 million views. If it stays for a day, it even has the chance to garner over ten million views. According to Facebook's view calculation formula, each IP can only be counted as one view for each piece of content; all other views are invalid clicks.
And at present, Facebook has only around 20 million active users daily. A video that can achieve tens of millions of views is at the ceiling of Facebook's view count.
Currently, there are fewer than 100 pieces of content on Facebook that have surpassed ten million views. Each of these pieces of content is a significant tag for Facebook and a hot topic of internet memory.
The current top-viewed content on Facebook is also a video. The uploader is none other than Huang He himself. He uploaded the video of the 3D-rendered vacuum-tube high-speed train that he had previously showcased on a television program to Facebook, and to this day, it has garnered over 36 million views. It is said that it still receives over 2 million views per month, making it a must-watch video for all new users and the undisputed number one on Facebook.
Considering that "How Could a Man Be So Handsome" has appeared in this trending recommendation position, one can imagine the immense impact it can generate.
This video remained on the Homepage Hot for a total of 8 hours. By the time it was pushed down by other content, its view count had exceeded 5 million, becoming the highest-viewed video among all of Third Rate Extra's uploads.
After it was removed from the trending section, the view count continued to grow rapidly, generally maintaining an increase of over 100,000 views per hour.
Simultaneously, Third Rate Extra opened up external links, and instantly, hundreds of links were promoted.
The external link feature is a highly controversial function on Facebook. This feature allows for the generation of an external link for a specific piece of content on Facebook. Other website users can then freely copy this link and paste it onto their own websites. This allows the content on Facebook, including videos, text, audio, and photos, to be displayed directly on those websites without needing to open the Facebook website itself.
This feature sparked significant debate among Facebook's top executives when it was being prepared for release. Supporters believed the feature was excellent for attracting users from other websites to Facebook, as all externally linked videos would directly display the Facebook logo, helping Facebook continuously attract users from various websites across the internet, which was seen as a good thing.
However, many executives opposed the external link feature because they felt it would turn Facebook into a tool for other websites' promotion.
Because external links allowed other websites to play Facebook content directly without opening the Facebook website, these shared external links could not drive traffic to Facebook; they only drove traffic to the external websites themselves.
What was even more infuriating was that, since the essence of an external link was to play content stored on Facebook's servers and the traffic directed also went to Facebook's servers, it resulted in Facebook being exploited as a tool for other websites. These external websites utilized Facebook's servers and bandwidth while driving traffic to themselves. Thinking of this, many Facebook executives were furious, naturally deeming the external link feature a truly disgusting function.
Furthermore, Facebook had no need to promote external links at all, as its primary users were almost exclusively on Facebook, and there was no need to put content on other websites for exploration.
At that time, the executives were completely divided into two factions, arguing endlessly and disagreeing with each other, causing headaches for everyone. Ultimately, these issues were all brought before the big boss of Facebook, and concurrently the CEO of OO Network, Leng Zhimeng.
Leng Zhimeng did not dare to act unilaterally, so she passed the problem to Huang He.
Huang He was also somewhat confused by the issue and didn't know how to handle it.
In fact, this problem had already occurred in another world. At that time, many video websites emerged in China around the same period, imitating YouTube. Popular video sites born during that era included Tudou, Youku, 56.com, Jidong.com, Ku6, and PPTV, Xunlei Kankan, and this was just the early stage. Later, Tencent Video and iQiyi also joined the competition.
Therefore, video website competition at that time was extremely fierce. To attract users from other websites, major video sites all launched external link features.
However, as websites gradually failed in the competition, the video website landscape eventually entered a state of three-way rivalry. Concurrently, these websites also discovered that external links had directly turned them into mere tools. Consequently, major websites began to abolish external links and switch to share links.
This meant that while you could share content, clicking the share link would inevitably direct users to their own website, thoroughly channeling users to their own platforms. At this point, external links were effectively dead.
Based on this outcome, Mr. Huang should have directly chosen to abandon the external link feature. Following the historical trend would never be wrong.
However, Mr. Huang had a slight internal conflict. In his previous life, what Mr. Huang hated most was accidentally seeing an interesting video or content title, clicking on it, being redirected to another website, and then having to wait for tens of seconds of advertisements before watching the video.
As a commoner in his past life, Mr. Huang was actually a fervent supporter of external links because the feature was very convenient and greatly optimized user experience. If he were to prohibit external links now, and this convenient feature disappeared, wouldn't he be turning into the kind of person he most disliked?
But to be fair, external links did cause significant damage to enterprises.
Unable to make up his mind, Mr. Huang decided to pass the buck and threw the decision-making power back to Leng Zhimeng, telling her that he "fully trusted and supported her decision, and as the CEO of OO Network, Leng Zhimeng had the right to make the decision she believed was correct," and then he sent Leng Zhimeng away.
Well, since Facebook had no competitors at the moment, even if external links were lost, there wouldn't be any terrible consequences. If necessary, prohibiting external links in the future wouldn't be a difficult task. He would let Leng Zhimeng practice her decision-making skills.
Consequently, Leng Zhimeng locked herself in her office to ponder deeply (Leng Zhimeng swore to the heavens that she hadn't played games for three days!) and made a decision: to support the use of external links, with a few minor modifications.
First, a 5-second introductory clip, namely a Facebook promotional video, would be added to all shared external links.
Five seconds is neither too long nor too short. It would annoy some users but not to an unbearable extent. If users found these 5 seconds intolerable, they would eventually choose to become Facebook users directly.
Of course, videos on Facebook's own website would not have promotional advertisements.
At the same time, Facebook's external links were subject to a paid restriction. Only accounts with Jiangnan Coins in their balance could use external links. However, using external links would not incur a fee; charges would only apply when these external links were clicked.
Every time a user from another website clicked an external link to watch a video, a fee ranging from 0.1 to 1 Jiangnan Coin, depending on the video's length, would be deducted. According to the exchange rate of 1 RMB to 10 Jiangnan Coins, if a video less than a minute long was clicked 100 times via an external link, it would only cost 1 RMB.
Most notably, if users were willing to pay double the fee, they could opt to remove the 5-second promotional video intro from shared links. This rule, in many ways, felt like a VIP membership.
Good heavens, they had started charging fees and even charging VIP fees to their competitors.
So, would this policy be effective?
When Leng Zhimeng first announced this policy to all the senior executives, they were in an uproar, believing the policy was a beautiful idea but ultimately useless, as external sites would never pay to use their external links. They feared that in the future, these external sites might use hacking methods to bypass their promotional videos or disable the fee collection restrictions, as many hackers were actively engaged in such activities and were quite rampant.
However, this policy was soon unanimously approved by all senior executives. For the restrictionists, this policy could limit the development of external links. For the victory-seekers, as long as external links were created, it was a victory!
As a result, a month after the external link feature was launched, astonishing data was presented to all senior executives: through external links, Facebook had earned a full 80 million Jiangnan Coins in one month, equivalent to an income of 8 million RMB.
This income, while not excessively high relative to Facebook's current scale and operating costs, was a solid revenue stream that could offset a portion of Facebook's increasingly substantial operating expenses.