How The Internet Serves as Free Advertising

  My mom has recently developed a habit of sending me pictures of all the memes featuring "Baby Yoda" from the Disney+ series The Mandalorian whenever she finds them. While I enjoy looking at the memes, a part of me thinks about how they are essentially serving as free advertising for the show. The modern Internet culture that has developed around short-form entertainment like memes and video clips has served as a tool for media to spread from person to person more easily than ever before. Ultimately, the corporations that produce this media are able to get increased sales based on advertising that they never paid a cent for.

  While "word of mouth" advertising has always played a role in getting people to consume movies, TV shows, and other forms of media, the Internet has taken this concept and brought it to a new level. In a world where anyone can communicate with everyone else on the planet whenever they want to, discussion of popular new media can grow far bigger than it could with face-to-face communication. This is because people with common interests can find each other online much more easily than they could in real life. Ultimately, this has led to the increased growth of "fanbases" surrounding various forms of media. People's natural tendency to want to belong makes them more likely to want to join these fanbases, which essentially serves as a form of advertising.

  However, this concept of advertising can spread farther than just close-knit fanbases. As discussed earlier, the rise of memes has made clips and images from various forms of media reach mainstream audiences with relative ease. Memes are even made from scenes from trailers before a movie's release, further highlighting the connection between memes and advertising. The Internet's culture has made sharing images of scenes from movies or TV widely accepted as long as they are put in a "funny" context. The ultimate consequence of the Internet is that we are becoming advertisers without companies telling us to, meaning that they have more influence over our lives and our thoughts than ever before.