Lords of the Viral Internet

Talk to some of the foremost practitioners of the dark arts of web journalism, and they'll all tell you the same thing: There's no secret formula for making a story go viral on the Internet.

It's a mix of informed guesswork, innate sensibility and trial and error. And as these three titans of traffic show, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

Jimmy Soni, 28, Managing editor, Huffington Post Media Group; Jack Shepherd, 35, Editorial director and Beastmaster, BuzzFeed; and Neetzan Zimmerman, 32, Editor-in-chief, Whisper; former senior editor, Gawker; founder, the Daily What.