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One of the best every example of viral marketing has got to be Hotmail which is a web based email service founded by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia back on Independence day back in 1996.

The idea was so simple and extremely powerful.

Give people a free email address, then at the end of every email that’s sent out include a short message with a sign up link so they too could get a free hotmail account.

What worked in Hotmails favor was that it was one of the very first free webmail services. So whilst the market was much smaller back then there was a huge novelty and viral factor simply because it was new and it was free.

Hotmail was eventually acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million and rebranded MSN Hotmail. I’m sure it’ll be a long time until we see something this viral again!