Who makes online content popular?
A common trend among websites is to rank free content stored at the site by popularity. Indeed, this is the entire basis behind social news and social bookmarking sites. However, video sharing sites, bloggers and even major news publishers, such at the New York Times Online and CNN online, have acquired this practice. The reason is simple: with so much online content at their disposal and to expedite good content discovery, many users prefer to assume that popular content is synonymous with good content. 50 million screaming fans can’t be wrong, right?
As interesting and relevant as this trend is, it begs an important question: who is responsible for the growth of content popularity? A recent article in the Journal of Interactive Marketing (DOI: 10.1002/dir.20111) by Guiyou Qiu and Purushottam Papatla addresses this very question. Using data made available by the social bookmarking site delicious.com, the authors tracked the growth of popularity of two items among site users. Here, popularity of an item grows as users add the item to their list of bookmarks. Strikingly, both items showed popularity growth curves that looked similar to the following:
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