“100 Airplanes” Goes Viral

Isabel Goyer

Monday, August 27, 2012 at 05:48 PM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Flying Magazine's "Top 100 Airplanes" feature achieved unprecedented digital success, garnering nearly 2 million views rapidly and becoming the parent company's biggest digital product.
The list generated strong, often emotional, reactions from readers, who frequently expressed dissatisfaction over omitted favorite aircraft or the lack of transparent selection criteria.
The author describes the difficult process of creating the list and admits it was "irresponsible" due to the predictable "mayhem" of reader responses.
Traditional selection criteria like speed or popularity proved ineffective, leading the magazine to develop a unique, undisclosed methodology that ultimately worked.

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I wrote last month about our Web feature “Flying Magazine’s Top 100 Airplanes,” which we launched on flyingmag.com just before the big airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in July. As you might have heard, the list was an immediate hit, generating nearly 2 million views within just days of its release. Within that short span it became by far the biggest digital product not just in Flying‘s history but also in the history of our parent company, which spans more than 50 titles.

The process of creating a list of the top 100 airplanes was one of the most enjoyable tasks I’ve devoted myself to in my 18 years at Flying (apart from the actual flying of airplanes, that is). Creating the compendium of 100 airplanes wasn’t easy fun, however: Starting with a pool of tens of thousands of aircraft and narrowing it down to just 100 was a fiendishly difficult endeavor. It was fun precisely because of that fact.