of Medicine when she came across a piece entitled “Coughing and
Aerosols.” As soon as she saw it she knew the research would be the perfect
basis for an article in the Times. Some of the piece was pretty technical,
with discussions of infectious aerosols and velocity maps. But above all the
jargon was a simple image, an image that made Grady decide to write her
article.
Simply put, it was amazing. The reason people shared Grady’s article
was emotion. When we care, we share.
MOST E-MAILED LISTS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF
SHARING
Humans are social animals. As discussed in the chapter on Social Currency,
people love to share opinions and information with others. And our
tendency to gossip—for good or ill—shapes our relationships with friends
and colleagues alike.
The Internet has become increasingly engineered to support these natural
inclinations. If people come across a blog post about a new bike sharing
program or find a video that helps kids solve tough algebra problems, they
can easily hit the Share button or copy and paste the link into an e-mail.
Most major news or entertainment websites take the extra step of
documenting what has been passed along most frequently. Listing which
articles, videos, and other content have been most viewed or shared over the
past day, week, or month.
People often use these lists as shortcuts. There is way too much content
available to sift through it all—hundreds of millions of websites and blogs,
billions of videos. For news alone, dozens of highly reputable outlets
continuously produce new articles.
Few people have time to seek out the best content in this ocean of
information. So they start by checking out what others have shared.
As a result, most-shared lists have a powerful ability to shape public
discourse. If an article about financial reform happens to make the list,
while one about environmental reform barely falls short, that initially small
difference in interest can quickly become magnified. As more people see
and share the article about financial reform, citizens may become convinced
that financial reform deserves more governmental attention than
environmental reform, even if the financial issue is mild and the
environmental issue severe.
So why does some content make the Most E-Mailed list while other
content does not?
For something to go viral, lots of people have to pass along the same
piece of content at around the same time. You might have enjoyed Denise
Grady’s cough article, and maybe you shared it with a couple of friends.
But for the piece to make the Most E-Mailed list, a large number of people
had to make the same decision you did.
Is this just random? Or might there be some consistent patterns
underlying viral success?
SYSTEMATICALLY ANALYZING THE MOST E-MAILED
LIST
The life of a Stanford graduate student is far from grand. My office, if you
could call it that, was a high-walled cubicle. It was tucked up in a
windowless attic of a 1960s-era building whose architectural style has often
been described as “brutalist.” A short, squat structure with concrete walls so
thick they could probably withstand a direct hit from a small grenade
launcher. Sixty of us were clustered together in a cramped space, and my
own ten-by-ten fluorescent-lit box was shared with another student.
The one upside was the elevator. Graduate students were expected to be
working at all times of day and night, so the school gave us a keycard that
allowed twenty-four-hour access to a special lift. Not only did it take us up
to our windowless workstations, it also gave us access to the library, even
after it closed. Not the most lavish perk, but a useful one.
Back then the distribution of online content was not as sophisticated as it
is today. Content websites now post their most e-mailed lists online, but
some newspapers published these lists in their print editions as well. Every
day The Wall Street Journal published a list of the five most read articles
and the five most e-mailed articles from the previous day’s news. After
scanning a couple of these lists, I was enthralled. It seemed like the perfect
data source to study why some things get shared more than others.
So just as a stamp collector collects stamps, I began to collect the
Journal’s Most Emailed list.
Once every couple of days I would use the special elevator to go hunting.
I would take my trusty scissors down to the library late at night, find a stack
of the most recent print editions of the Journal, and carefully clip out the
Most Emailed lists.
After a few weeks, my collection had grown. I had a big stack of news
clippings and was ready to go. I entered the lists in a spreadsheet and began
looking for patterns. One day “Dealing with the Dead Zone: Spouses Too
Tired to Talk” and “Disney Gowns Are for Big Girls” were two of the most
e-mailed articles. A few days later “Is an Economist Qualified to Solve
Puzzle of Autism?” and “Why Birdwatchers Now Carry iPods and Laser
Pointers” made the list.
—————
Hmm. On the face of it, these articles had few characteristics in common.
What did tired spouses have to do with Disney gowns? And what did
Disney have to do with economists studying autism? The connections were
not going to be obvious.
Further, reading one or two articles at a time wasn’t going to cut it. To get
a handle on things I needed to work faster and more efficiently.
Luckily my colleague Katherine Milkman suggested a vastly improved
method. Rather than pull this information from the print newspaper by
hand, why not automate the process?
With the help of a computer programmer, we created a Web crawler. Like
a never tiring reader, the program automatically scanned The New York
Times home page every fifteen minutes, recording what it saw. Not only the
text and title of each article, but also who wrote it and where it was featured
(posted on the main screen or hidden in a trail of links). It also recorded in
which section of the physical paper (health or business, for example) and on
what page the article appeared (such as the front page or the back of the
third section).
After six months we had a huge data set—every article published by The
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