I Don’t Get the Algorithm! One of My Drive-In Speaker Videos Went Viral.
I Don't Get The Algorithm. One of my Drive-In Speaker Videos Went Viral.
I don’t know exactly what I did, but I think something was unlocked, turned on, cranked up… or something? I had an Instagram post go viral! Well, viral for me. Let’s back up. I have a few social media sites that pertain to a few different topics, one of which is my “Remember The Drive-In” account. This particular account was started in May of 2019 and the sole purpose was to help generate
interest in the vintage drive-in movie speaker restorations that I was doing and selling at area car shows. I quickly also started added my vintage gumball machine restoration photos and videos as well. With Covid happening less than a year after opening the account, going to the car shows dried up for a bit and so I built a website: www.RememberTheDriveIn.com. And in that past seven years on IG at the most I MIGHT get up to 25 likes on a post? But the reality is the past two years it has simply been dead. I would get 3-8 likes and I know 3-4 of them would be family! It was a waste of time when I would look at the metrics – my followers, around 330, simply were not seeing my Reels and Photos. Frustrated, I was just about to give up on the account and just let it sit. And then this past Wednesday happened.
Wednesday mid-morning I posted a simple 18 second video as a “Reel” on IG of a 1960s Koropp drive-in movie speaker set that I had finished restoring that week. It was really no different than the hundreds of other drive-in videos I’ve posted where I walk up the speaker set with the camera while it plays a vintage drive-in intermission or snack bar ad, I go up and down the speaker set showing close-ups of the work, then I grab the left speaker with my free hand to show a close up of the speaker enclosure. Text is added showing my website address. I write a simple description about what it is and when it is from, as well as a few hashtags… ALWAYS the same few hashtags. By that afternoon I was sitting on the couch talking with my wife and I showed her, “Look at this! I have 2,000 likes on my video today! This has never happened!”
Then it REALLY blew up! It is now Sunday morning (almost four days later) and that single video has been viewed an astonishingly 347,162 times as I am typing this (Update: over 1/2 million views by 3/7/2026 now)! 9.9 thousand likes, 78 comments, 428 shares, 131 reposts, and 870 people have saved it! I went from having less than ten likes for years to 9,900! What the heck happened? Did Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram) push some kind of magic button? This has really been an amazing few days and honestly a welcome delight when I was just about to pull the plug. It boils down to I obviously DO NOT know anything about how this friggin’ algorithm works on this platform. Really any platform!
I realize that whatever happened is most likely a fluke and will probably not happen again. But some good things have resulted as I have gained so many new followers and have had people ask me questions about the speaker sets. Many of them are folks that have no clue what they even are or why they existed! This is a great opportunity to share a little bit of history to the younger generation or those in countries where drive-in movie theaters simply never existed. One funny thing is one guy claimed that I made the speakers out of “Styrofoam” and painted them. Yeah, buddy, that’s what I did!
So I guess I owe thanks to the big algorithm in the sky for pushing the ON button and making my little video watched an equivalent of 46 days, 4 hours, 36 minutes, and 17 seconds as of this morning! It also inspired me to do a bit of drawing yesterday as I created a fictitious band called ‘Al & the Go Rhythms’. Algorithm has been on my mind. Art imitating life. It’s been a hoot the past few days doing the same thing as always and it just blowing up. I guess I still don’t understand that algorithm!
Comments? Questions? Email me at [email protected] and here is a look at the video that took off below. You can follow my drive-in speakers on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/rememberthedrivein/ and for retro pop culture, travel, antiques, and art follow me at https://www.instagram.com/rememberwayback/
