Building tension in a narrative, or, no one ever went broke...

Two BuzzFeed staffers sat around a small, circular table, wearing smocks and safety glasses. Between them was a watermelon and a pile of rubber bands. Their mission: blow up the watermelon by gradually adding bands until it burst from the tension.

Over the course of an hour, that tension — and BuzzFeed's audience — would grow exponentially. At its peak, the video, broadcast using Facebook Live, was watched by more than 800,000 people at the same time, according to a BuzzFeed spokesperson. To put that into perspective, that's more viewers than:

- MSNBC's average total dayside viewers in February. (526,000)

- The number of viewers, on average, who tuned into "Reliable Sources" each Sunday in 2015. (522,000)

Link here.