Power law and spreading of viral videos
The way new media spreads is very different today than it was in the past. Videos, images, and news articles now go “viral,” or are seen by an increasingly large number of people, due to social networks. In this article, four specific examples of media, all videos, are analyzed to see how they spread. Due to each being initially presented on a different form of social media, the manner and speed with which they spread varied greatly.
A video of an astronaut singing was posted onto Twitter, and then was seen immediately by all of the followers of the poster. This resulted in a large spike and then decay of the number of people sharing the video. People first shared it to all their followers, who then decided whether or not to share it with their followers. After a few rounds of this, over the course of a week, the number of people sharing the video had decayed with a power law down to very few shares per day.
In the case of the Ryan Gosling vine series, there was a different pattern. When the first vine was posted, only a few people saw and shared the video. After the fifth part was posted, someone with nearly a half million followers shared the video, causing a large spike in the shares of the video. A day later, the shares were back down to nearly nothing, as people lost interest. A couple weeks and a few more videos later, another influential person shared the videos, causing another large spike in the shares per day of the video. This caused a longer “life” of the videos, as compared to the astronaut’s video, which was “dead” in a matter of days.
This relates to a few aspects of the course, most importantly the sharing of information, and the power law. The power law is obvious in the decay of the shares per day, but is also evident in the lifetime of the video. In the examples above, the video that started faster lasted a shorter amount of time, because it was a higher power of both growth and decay, reaching its peak quickly and then dying off even quicker. The second video took longer to reach its peak, and therefore had a longer lifetime. The sharing of information and the spread of knowledge is shown in the sharing of videos. Someone will only share a video they deem to be important or entertaining, and that is shown in the patterns of the videos spreading. Some videos spread simply by brute force, meaning one person sent it to a lot of others. Other videos spread by many people sharing it with smaller amounts of people, who also shared the video to friends. There are many other ways to analyze the spread of viral videos, this article highlights a few.
http://www.facegroup.com/blog/how-videos-go-viral/