The Rich Get Richer in Social Media
https://unionmetrics.com/blog/2016/08/when-a-tweet-goes-viral/
These articles describes how content goes viral on the Internet. The first one discusses how Page Rank and links can increase a content’s popularity. Basically, the more links that are directed to the content, the greater chance the content has of going viral. It also discusses how popular content will continue to rise in popularity, illustrating the rich-get-richer effect. The second article talks about what happens when a tweet goes viral. We can use the rich-get-richer effect to examine why a YouTube video with 1 million views can skyrocket to 10 million and why a tweet with 10,000 retweets can quickly become 100,000.
If we take a look at the YouTube video situation, we can see how a search engine can amplify the rich-get-richer effect. If you go on the homepage of YouTube, you will see that a majority of the videos that are promoted already have over 1 million views. In addition, both Google and YouTube will prioritize videos by views in search results. Also, the growing number of viewers leads to an increase in sharing of the video which ultimately leads to more in links. This allows already popular content to continue to rise in popularity while videos with lower view counts remain the same.
Now we can examine the tweet situation. On Twitter, a popular tweet relies less on in links and more on something called retweets. Basically, a retweet is when a user shares a tweet with all of their users. Therefore, the most popular tweets have the most retweets. It can be argued that in order to reach a certain popularity, a tweet must pass the tipping point or a specific number of retweets. In the Networks textbook, one of the ways to get a product pass the tipping point involves getting an influential person to use the product. One of the common ways that a tweet becomes popular is when an influential person with millions of followers retweets that tweet. The tweet can then go viral since the influential person has a very large network of followers. In the second article, a graph of a viral tweet’s views is shown. The highest point occurred after a user with 1.2 million followers retweeted it. Furthermore, retweets allows a viral tweet to keep growing in popularity. For example, if a tweet has 1,000 retweets and if we assume that on average each user has 50 followers, that means the tweet will have been seen up to 50,000 times. This shows how a tweet’s popularity can grow exponentially. One can say that retweets are Twitter’s version of in links. In conclusion, the structure of social media enables the rich-get-richer effect and favors popular content.
