In April, a short video of 'The Joker holding a concert' went viral, followed by AI videos such as 'The Joker blowing up a hospital' and 'Elon Musk dancing with Spider-Man', which became popular on social networks, showcasing the 'instantaneous multiverse' of different characters.

These videos all come from a new AI video tool—Viggle. Launched in April this year, this AI video tool has seen its official website traffic surge from less than 10,000 to 6.4 million in just 2 months.

This is quite interesting. As one of the hottest tracks in the AI field, there are many AI video tools, and large companies also have their layouts. Why has Viggle soared on the traffic path? What did it do right?

In my opinion, Viggle's success benefits from two points:

First, it has good effects and is simple enough. It ensures video stability in product design while increasing ease of use, providing users with a better experience. For example, most text-to-video tools generate videos through prompts, while Viggle can generate videos without prompts.

Second, it makes full use of modular design and secondary creation, allowing users to have fun. In terms of dissemination paths, Viggle seizes the internet's demand for 'meme' content and achieves rapid fission through a large number of secondary creations. Viggle is presented in a modular form on the Discord platform, becoming a 'super plugin' for the community and increasing users' freedom of use.

/ 01 / Easy to use and simple, high-quality AI videos are within reach

One of the direct reasons for Viggle's rapid growth is its ease of use.

Previously, AI video models often encountered problems, especially when facing complex scene instructions, AI video models appeared to struggle in terms of content relevance, physical logic, and other aspects. However, Viggle doesn't have these issues.

Taking the viral 'Joker holding a concert' video in April as an example, Viggle captured the Joker's appearance and body from a flat image, transferred it to rapper Lil Yachty's skeleton, replicated Lil Yachty's physical actions such as kicking and turning, as well as his expressions, weight, and speed. It also reflected various forms of the Joker's front, side, and back views, as well as details like hands in the video.

From the generation effect, what you see is what you get with Viggle. Whether it's the character's action continuity, controllability, or the logical consistency of the scene, Viggle's video quality is very stable, ensuring the smoothness and realism of the final generated video.

Why doesn't Viggle encounter problems? Because Viggle proposes an innovative technical path:

Unlike many AI videos that rely on semantic understanding to generate videos, Viggle can directly tell the tool the requirements in video form. The AI simply replicates the actions by following the trajectory, bypassing semantic understanding and ensuring the 'authenticity' of the generated video.

In addition to being easy to use, being simple enough is also a reason why Viggle has become popular.

Viggle's ease of use promotes users' willingness to try it out. To obtain such outstanding video effects, you only need to upload a portrait image and video trajectory, and you can generate consistent character animation.

▲Viggle supports 4 modes: Mix, Animate, Ideate, Stylize

Currently, text/image-to-video tools like Pika, runway, and Sora still use prompts, while Viggle does not require prompts and only needs a portrait image and an action video.

For example, Raven used a photo of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and a segment of Apple executive Craig Federighi's famous parkour scene. Without waiting or rendering, he obtained the following video in just a few seconds:

Additionally, it supports an anime character image and a prompt to generate a dancing anime character video, similar to the previously popular Aliyun Tongyi Dance King, with high playability.

By simply operating, high-quality AI videos can be generated, truly making it possible with just a hand.

The only drawback is that Viggle currently only supports generating 1-minute videos at a time, and more detailed actions require tools like ComfyUI.

/ 02 / Modular plus secondary creation, triggering viral social media dissemination

From the data, Viggle's growth rate is rapid.

According to SimilarWeb data, since Viggle's launch in March, its traffic increased to around 3 million in April and doubled to 6.4 million in May.

▲Total traffic from March to May (Source: SimilarWeb)

From the dissemination path, Viggle's users mainly come from YouTube, TikTok, and other social media platforms. In other words, Viggle has achieved large-scale dissemination on social media.

The reason Viggle has such extensive dissemination is secondary creation and modularization.

Viggle naturally possesses dissemination attributes, specializing in generating out-of-the-box videos, such as recreating celebrity signature moves based on one's own or others' images, creating virtual characters, making meme videos, etc.

Plus, 70% of Viggle's user profile is 18-35 years old, belonging to the group with the strongest creativity and desire to share.

▲Viggle audience analysis (Source: SimilarWeb)

This gives Viggle a lot of room for secondary creation. Viggle has disseminated a large number of KOL works on Discord and TikTok, leveraging a large number of users on the platforms for dissemination. For example, TikTok blogger @nikkiiiblikkiii released a 'cat dancing' video on May 28, which received nearly 10 million views and 1.2 million likes.

As users' creativity is endless, secondary creation fission brings tremendous growth potential to Viggle. Many users are attracted by KOL promotions and other secondary creations on community platforms, retrieve Viggle through watermark markers, and are stimulated to participate in creation, forming an aesthetic fission process.

While the content is pleasing, Viggle has also made many design choices conducive to dissemination in product design. For example, Viggle makes full use of Discord's community attributes and prioritizes users' freedom of use.

Discord is not only a creative community but also a dissemination platform. When users see a video generated by Viggle on Discord, they can directly create on the platform without jumping between multiple platforms, ensuring that users' enthusiasm for use can be efficiently converted.

Viggle's interface on Discord is intuitive and easy to use, and users can directly enjoy various popular templates and characters (https://viggle.ai/prompt). For example, you can make Kobe, the Joker, Gojo Satoru...Anybody take turns doing parkour at an Apple product launch event with just one click.

This design has received recognition from many users. For example, AI video worker Harry said, "If you like the actions in the video but want a different theme and background, you can use these tools to complete it very quickly."

Viggle's modular design plays a significant role in attracting and activating new users. This is similar to the logic behind the popularity of CapCut (a video editing app).

CapCut arranges different functions in a modular form on the main interface. If you want to quickly create a holiday Vlog, you can select 'One-click Video Creation'. After importing the materials, CapCut will provide you with various editing templates. After selecting the desired style, you can directly 'export' to complete the video. This design once brought a large number of users to CapCut.

/ 03 / Conclusion: Can Viggle escape the fate of being a tool-based product?

From Miaoya Camera to Remini and Viggle, the paths to popularity for these AI applications are all the same: they satisfy users' demands for good and interesting content through modularization and secondary creation.

The dissemination path is roughly that experts first produce photos, the official generates templates, ordinary users use the templates to generate beautiful and shareable videos or images, and then conduct secondary dissemination.

However, such products will also face another problem, retention and commercialization. If they only provide entertainment, users will leave after trying them out, and modularization value is more reflected in attracting and activating new users, making it difficult to expect users to achieve long-term paid subscriptions.

From this perspective, while Viggle's current surge in traffic is indeed gratifying, ultimately, it depends on whether it can convert user-generated videos into economic benefits after taking this traffic shortcut.