http://www2009.eprints.org/73/
A Measurement-driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network
Online social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr
have become a popular way to share and disseminate content. Their
massive popularity has led to viral marketing techniques that at-
tempt to spread content, products, and ideas on these sites. How-
ever, there is little data publicly available on viral propagation in
the real world and few studies have characterized how information
spreads over current online social networks.
In this paper, we collect and analyze large-scale traces of infor-
mation dissemination in the Flickr social network. Our analysis,
based on crawls of the favorite markings of 2.5 million users on
11 million photos, aims at answering three key questions: (a) how
widely does information propagate in the social network? (b) how
quickly does information propagate? and (c) what is the role of
word-of-mouth exchanges between friends in the overall propaga-
tion of information in the network? Contrary to viral marketing
“intuition,” we find that (a) even popular photos do not spread
widely throughout the network, (b) even popular photos spread
slowly through the network, and (c) information exchanged be-
tween friends is likely to account for over 50% of all favorite-
markings, but with a significant delay at each hop.
Cha, Meeyoung
Mislove, Alan
Gummadi, Krishna P.
A Measurement-driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network
2009-04-06T19:10:40Z
Cha, Meeyoung <http://www2009.eprints.org/view/author/Cha=3AMeeyoung=3A=3A.html> and Mislove, Alan <http://www2009.eprints.org/view/author/Mislove=3AAlan=3A=3A.html> and Gummadi, Krishna P. <http://www2009.eprints.org/view/author/Gummadi=3AKrishna_P=2E=3A=3A.html> (2009) A Measurement-driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network. In: 18th International World Wide Web Conference, April 20th-24th, 2009, Madrid, Spain.
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