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 attempt to spread content, products, and ideas on these sites. However, 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 information 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 propagation of information in the network? Contrary to viral marketing "intuition," we find that (a) ev...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Meeyoung Cha, Alan Mislove, P. Krishna Gummadi
• Keywords: Flickr Social Network, Internet Technology, Viral Marketing, Viral Marketing Techniques, WWW 2009