The structural virality of online diffusion
Goel, Anderson, Hofman and Watts propose structural virality, a measure that runs from content spread by one large broadcast to content spread through many generations of person-to-person sharing. They apply it to about a billion diffusion events on Twitter, covering news stories, videos, images and petitions. Popular events spread through a mix of broadcast and viral mechanisms across all domains and sizes. Structural virality is generally low and stays low as events grow, so popularity depends mainly on the size of the largest broadcast. A model of low-rate contagion on a scale-free network reproduces several findings but not the observed variety of structural virality.
Goel, Anderson, Hofman and Watts propose structural virality, a measure that runs from content spread by one large broadcast to content spread through many generations of person-to-person sharing. They apply it to about a billion diffusion events on Twitter, covering news stories, videos, images and petitions. Popular events spread through a mix of broadcast and viral mechanisms across all domains and sizes. Structural virality is generally low and stays low as events grow, so popularity depends mainly on the size of the largest broadcast. A model of low-rate contagion on a scale-free network reproduces several findings but not the observed variety of structural virality.
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Goel, S., Anderson, A., Hofman, J., & Watts, D. J. (2016). The structural virality of online diffusion. Management Science, 62(1), 180-196. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2015.2158 https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2158