Henry Cavill breaks the internet (and what it says about how to build an audience in today’s hyper-political world)

By Kent R. Kroeger (July 31, 2020)

Freya Allan, Henry Cavill and Anya Chalotra speaking at the 2019 San Diego Comic Con for “The Witcher.” (Photo by Gage Skidmore; Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

OK, British actor Henry Cavill, star of Netflix’s The Witcher, didn’t actually break the internet — an overused and lazy description for digital content that spreads rapidly and organically through various social media platforms.

Examples of such content include music videos (Who can purge Rebecca Black’s “Friday” from their memory bank? — a YouTube video with over 144 million views), social commentary videos (My favorite being an ad agency-produced video titled “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” that has garnered over 49 million views since being posted in 2014 — more impressively, it has attracted over 270 response videos, generating over 147 million additional views ), and plain quirky videos — one of the most famous being “Star Wars Kid” which has enjoyed a modest 35 million views since its posting in 2006 and has inspired dozens of imitator and parody videos.

In Cavill’s case, a July 16th Instagram video of him building a gaming PC has already attracted over 4.7 million views in under two weeks.

And the original Cavill-produced video has inspired dozens (by now, maybe hundreds) of reaction videos — more aptly described as videos of…