What Makes Online Content Viral?

Sharing online content is an integral part of modern life.People forward newspaper articles to their friends, pass YouTube videos to their relatives, and send restaurant reviews to their neighbors. Indeed, 59% of people report that they frequently share online content with others (Allsop, Bassett, and Hoskins 2007), and someone tweets a link to a New York Times story once every four seconds (Harris 2010). Such social transmission also has an important impact on both consumers and brands. Decades of research suggest that interpersonal communication affects attitudes and decision making (Asch 1956; Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955), and recent work has demonstrated the causal impact of word of mouth on product adoption and sales (Chevalier and Mayz -lin 2006; Godes and Mayzlin 2009). Although it is clear that social transmission is both frequent and important, less is known about why certain pieces of online content are more viral than others. Some customer service experiences spread throughout the blogosphere,while others are never shared. Some newspaper articles earn a position on their website’s “most e-mailed list,” while others languish. Companies often create online ad campaigns or encourage consumer-generated content in the hope that people will share this content with others, but some of these efforts take off while others fail. Is virality just random, as some argue (e.g., Cashmore 2009), or might certain characteristics predict whether content will be highly shared?This article examines how content characteristics affectvirality. In particular, we focus on how emotion shapes social transmission. We do so in two ways. First, we analyze a unique data set of nearly 7000 New York Times articles to examine which articles make the newspaper’s “most emailed list.” Controlling for external drivers of attention,such as where an article was featured online and for how long.

Keywords: word of mouth, viral marketing, social transmission, onlinecontent