Fyre Festival: You Don't Need Millions To Go Viral

With all the (bad) buzz going around about Fyre festival, Shutterstock wanted to remind all of us that it should not have to cost millions to go viral.

If you’ve seen the new Netflix documentary about Fyre festival, you are probably wondering how and why so many people fell for what happened to be a scam. Well, truth being told, their marketing team was pretty good. The first video trailer for the event included professional models, a private island and a full camera crew, just that. There is no detailed information on the marketing budget, but it is easy to guess this video would have cost a lot to produce.

At Shutterstock they knew they could do this on a much smaller budget. So they did. Using only footage from Shutterstock and royalty-free music from PremiumBeat, the team recreated the Fyre trailer video. It took only one day to make with just 18 different Shutterstock clips.

.@Shutterstock thought they could produce a Fyre-like viral video on a much smaller budget. So they did, and it cost under $5,000.

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How much did it really cost, you may ask?

The total cost for making this video was less than $5,000, including footage licensing for 18 clips in this collection ($2,062 USD), music licensing on PremiumBeat ($199 USD for a premium license, $65 for a standard one) plus post-production costs.