
Products Don't Spread Virally - teaspoon
http://messymatters.com/2011/07/31/viral/
======
bermanoid
How can one breathe the word "viral" and claim to debunk the concept without
looking at data from one of the many Facebook apps that actually, you know,
_went viral_? [that's a rhetorical question, I fully realize that the answer
is that they don't have any truly worthwhile data to look at]

The lone Facebook app in the study is one that the authors made themselves,
and it's no surprise if you've never heard of it: while I wouldn't take
AppData's stats as golden, they're usually in the ballpark, and they claim
Friend Sense maxed out at 317 MAU
(<http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/7890187783-friend-sense>) - to give you
a sense of scale, the 2000th most popular app on Facebook had over 100,000 MAU
([http://www.appdata.com/leaderboard/apps?fanbase=0&metric...](http://www.appdata.com/leaderboard/apps?fanbase=0&metric_select=mau&page=50)).
Even under the assumption that it's hard to get solid data on such low traffic
apps, it's easy to conclude that no, Friend Sense is _not_ a representative
example of a successful Facebook application, let alone a viral hit...

I can't give you numbers or anything, but I don't need to violate an NDA to
tell you that if you're actually at a point where you're making real money off
of Facebook apps, you're almost certainly seeing non-negligible virality, and
you should be thinking about it, measuring it, and incorporating it into
whatever business analysis you're doing. Your viral coefficient may not be
greater than 1 (and if it is, God bless you and enjoy the ride, at least until
you saturate!), but trying to increase it is nowhere near as futile as these
authors claim - successful apps have network structures that can be very broad
and very deep, and most would not have been successful at all without them.

~~~
dreeves
I think you're confusing "virality" with "popularity". Or maybe it's a God of
the Gaps argument -- if we looked at sufficiently popular stuff we'd see viral
propagation!

The study considered a pretty diverse set of online stuff, with, I presume,
many millions of total adoptions. Essentially none of those adoptions were due
to viral propagation.

That seems compelling to me.

(PS, I'm Sharad Goel's coblogger at Messy Matters though I wasn't involved in
this research.)

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nhebb
This piece leaves me unconvinced that some products don't spread virally. It
only shows that they didn't spread virally in the environments measured. I
could list dozens of products and services that I know about and use only
because of word of mouth (both on and off online). The problem for marketers
is that identifying viral growth after the fact is easy, but trying to spark
it is very difficult.

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jacques_chester
I think this sinks "viral" for now, at least as a strict analogy to
epidemiology.

I can count on one hand the number of times where I have forwarded something,
or had forwarded to me, something that was "viral".

Every "viral" meme I've ever seen came from a specific broadcast-dominant
system. Whether it be Slashdot, Reddit, HN and so on; I've gotten 'infected'
simultaneously with thousands or millions of other people. There was no peer-
to-peer spread, merely a direct fanout to individuals.

Whenever my friends and I have commented on a current meme, we've been
synchronised to within about 48 hours by the propagation of memes between
_websites_ , not _people_.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
This model doesn't sound _that_ different from measles and schools. One kid
brings it, then everyone gets to stay home for a week or two.

~~~
teaspoon
The article makes a similar point; there are plenty of viruses, like Hep A,
that propagate in a non-"viral" manner.

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wallflower
Hotmail and Paypal were two of the earliest and most famous viral products.

To redeem money in Paypal, you needed an account.

If you got an email from a HoTMaiL user, there was a viral auto inserted
footer.

And, most important, for these two products, they didn't attempt to track your
every click, plain web urls...

~~~
guard-of-terra
I fail to understand how hotmail could be viral.

To receive the message with "viral" footer, you had to already have a mailbox.
If you did, why bother?

Maybe it was viral in the sense that it was the first widespread webmail and
thus was in demand?

~~~
wallflower
Yes, I remember paying for an email account that was POP3 based and part of my
ISP monthly fee. I couldn't (easily) access it when away from my home machine
because there was no web interface and most importantly - if I changed ISPs, I
lost access to my old email address. It's easy for us to forget that permanent
email addresses used to be prestige things.

Hotmail with its simple tag line - get hotmail, free web based email was a
pioneer.

For me, it was my very first personal cloud based service. At a time when
those who had email accounts had them through thick clients like Eudora. It
was a big deal. I still retain my hotmail account for sentimental reasons.

------
Mz
_For every book or album purchased because of a personal recommendation,
however, how many were bought after simply browsing the stacks, reading a
review, or seeing an advertisement?_

This was never how I conceptualized the idea of "viral". I basically viewed it
as "taking on a life of it's own" such that it took little initial effort to
get a big effect. Yes, people spreading it is a factor, but if it weren't
inherently interesting in some way, it wouldn't be "contagious".

Edit: Besides, supposedly the first 50 cases of AIDS in the US could all be
traced back to one person. Even actual virii don't follow the path this piece
seems to artificially be trying to impose on the term

------
praptak
How do they know if they got every instance of person-to-person spread?
E-mail, IM (3 different ones), Google+, personal communication - that's how I
get the jumping cats of the internet. Unless you monitor all of that, you'll
get an anti-spread bias.

The only way to be sure of the actual spread graph is to monitor an invite-
only service, which of course might not be 100% representative of other kinds
of services/products.

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zby
1\. The 'kill marketers' puzzle was not funny.

2\. There is no link to the paper it is talking about.

3\. The blog post has many holes in the reasoning.

By the way I really liked the 'spreadable media' idea by Henry Jenkins and
_his_ arguments against using the word 'viral'
([http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_...](http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html)).

~~~
leon_
1\. I found it funny. :(

------
vannevar
While product adoption may not be viral, perhaps product marketing is. One
small blog picks up a story, which may in turn get picked up by a bigger blog,
which then gets picked up by a major media outlet. The adoption profile still
_looks_ viral, even though the adopters are not communicating their
preferences directly to each other through the social network.

