WORKS CITED
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Berger, Jonah, and Katherine L. Milkman. “What Makes Online Content Viral?” Journal of Marketing Research, vol. 49, no. 2, Apr. 2012, pp. 192–205. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23142844.
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Tellis, Gerard J., et al. “What Drives Virality (Sharing) of Online Digital Content? The Critical Role of Information, Emotion, and Brand Prominence.” Journal of Marketing, vol. 83, no. 4, Apr. 2019, pp. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242919841034
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Quesenberry, Keith A., and Michael K. Coolsen. “Drama Goes Viral: Effects of Story Development on Shares and Views of Online Advertising Videos.” Journal of Interactive Marketing, vol. 48, no. 1, May 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2019.05.001.
FINAL draft
Prospectus Essay: Viral videos on the Internet
Nov 8, 2022. By Sierra Zhang.
BACKGROUND
I love creating high-quality videos, but one thing not so lovely is that they were never a hit. However, some of my lower-quality videos gathered a lot more views. For example, my medium-length movie that a 15-person team spent six months on got around 1500 views in a year, but a simple supercut I edited in half an hour exceeded 10,000 views in two days. “Huh, why is there a mismatch between my effort and views?” I always wondered. I propose there should be other hidden factors other than effort influencing the virality of online content. But what are they? I am afraid that if I do not learn about them, this “mismatch” I noticed will become a threat when I wish to create a business later that aims to influence people’s habits for the better through great products and strong corporate spirits — High-quality products will not sell if few people notice them. Therefore, I wish to look deeply into viral phenomena, specifically viral videos and apply what I learned when the time comes.
Following my personal connection with viral videos on the Internet, I start to ask, What are the secrets behind the viral spreading of online videos? All the existing research I have come across focused on one or a few possible viral aspects, like social behavior, emotions, or content quality. Instead, I wish to present a comprehensive picture of the systemic reasons behind virality — how different factors “collaborate” and organically integrate into the process of virality. This intention is similar to what Keith A. Quesenberry, a marketing professor and researcher at Messiah College, and others stated in their peer-reviewed article ”Drama Goes Viral,” popularity is fostered by “an organic process where consumers find viral ads through sharing from other consumers” (Quesenberry and Coolsen). Inspired by their idea, I describe the process of virality as the “Möbius strip of virality” (see Fig. 1). virality happens when the “Möbius strip of virality” gets activated for an online video, causing it to circulate through the “strip” repeatedly. Specifically, video features initiate the strip, which induces psychological changes that catalyze social motivation, which leads to sharing. Sharing, being influenced by the external environment, fosters seeing. And then, this process repeats. The “Möbius strip of virality” also serves as the roadmap for this project.
Many features of the original videos induce psychological changes such as emotions. One of the most prominent features that induce sharing is plot development, as marketing professor Quesenberry and others indicate in their work ”Drama Goes Viral,” “an incremental story development effect on shares and views” (Quesenberry and Coolsen). Specifically, videos with surprising endings and characters most people would like are going to, according to what Gerard J. Tellis, a professor and director of the Center for Global Innovation at Marshall School of Business, describes in the article “What Drives Virality (Sharing) of Online Digital Content?” “significantly affect positive uplifting emotions” (Tellis et al.). Following this path, positive psychological changes match up with social factors such as self, community, and altruistic motivations, which induce sharing. The emotions described earlier “stimulate significantly positive social sharing” (Tellis et al.) as they match the self-motivation goal of sharing things enjoyable and community motivation of fostering sharing since they are likely to be shared by others.
Sharing fosters seeing. When one person shares an online video, it becomes visible to potentially tens, hundreds, thousands, or even more users of the Internet. Along the way, external environmental factors influence the fostering effects of sharing. For example, the fast development of new social media and video platforms offers content creators new channels to deliver their videos. At the same time, technologies used on these websites can also influence sharing and seeing. As the Washington Post author Geoffrey A. Fowler in his article, “I gave Instagram photos of my baby. Instagram returned fear,” social media platforms adopt algorithms that use “signals” to guess what users are interested in and push content to them (Fowler). The fast-growing user base of some video platforms could also potentially provide a massive opportunity for view increment.
In summary, I will support the working thesis, “Möbius strip of virality,” by discussing how the flow of video features, psychological changes, social motivations, and fostering makes sense with external academic or other credible sources as support.
INTRODUCTION
[Fig. 1] The “Möbius strip of virality.”
The mind map clearly illustrates this research project’s logical roadmap and lenses. It is attached on the next page. The targeted audience of this research is content creators with some academic backgrounds who wish to boost views of their content and positively contribute to society.
ROADMAP
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1]. Parikka, Jussi. "Viral Aesthetics." The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, Marie-Laure Ryan, et al., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st edition, 2014. Credo Reference.
In this chapter of the book, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, called “Viral Aesthetics,” Jussi Parikka, new media theorist and Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, briefly elaborated on the relationship between digital aesthetics, vitality, and the milieu by introducing several related cases. The author claims that virality comes from aesthetics, representation, visualization, and presentation. This work proposes a mathematical perspective to explain network effects fostering sharing of viral content. It is an excellent reference to the macro social environment but is too theoretical and lacks an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of viral content.
Compared to other works in this bibliography that focused on in-depth but narrower insights into viral videos, this work presents a general birds-eye view of all viral content on the web. It is more of a brief introduction, is less detailed, and may not make it into one of the works cited articles in the final project. However, it is handy to point a direction for my research — how the viral phenomena can be related to the social environment. It helps me notice the “environmental factors” of vitality and “internal factors.” It also points to other valuable resources in its reference section.
[2]. Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. Plume, 2003.
According to the UC Library, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a network scientist who is also the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University, is “nation’s foremost expert in the new science of networks” (UC Library). His book Linked compares social networks and corporations to living organisms. It emphasizes their similarities, stating that human innovations in an interconnected world also spread in a contagious network, just like viruses. This book was written from a network sciences perspective and focused more on links between networks and the flows of information on them. Therefore, I might need to thoroughly read the book, pick up insightful information and reconstruct, repurpose, and cross-reference them to get compelling insights on content virality.
This book will provide fresh ideas on integrating biological evidence into my highly social-focused research. One of my classmates in the UGBA class inspired me to look up “network effects,” and I think this book will provide some insight into this concept. It can provide a deep understanding of “social environment” — one of the environmental factors of virality I summarized — and construct arguments based on it. Depending on the information I get from reading this book, I might even reconstruct some of the core arguments as this book provides a vital look into how shared information gets passed on, and “sharing” is a vital element of my “Möbius strip of virality.”
[3]. Berger, Jonah, and Katherine L. Milkman. “What Makes Online Content Viral?” Journal of Marketing Research, vol. 49, no. 2, Apr. 2012, pp. 192–205. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23142844.
Author Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman are Professors at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In their peer-reviewed article, which has been cited over 3,400 times on Google Scholar, they focused on published work in the New York Times magazine to analyze the effect of emotions on the virality of contents. According to their research results, contents that induce highly positive or negative emotions spread more virally as they stimulate activation for the transmission of information. The credentials of the professors suggest that this article was written from a business-focused perspective, and factors influencing the sharing of ads may vary from those that induce sharing of non-commercial content.
This article focuses on a psychological approach, which will be a nice addition to [4] on this list which is more data- and category-focused. It helps me notice “emotion” as a crucial factor under the “psychological changes,” an internal factor of virality I brainstormed. One possible limitation of this work is that since it was published ten years ago, in 2012, some descriptions might not perfectly match today’s more-developed internet and social environment.
[4]. Tellis, Gerard J., et al. “What Drives Virality (Sharing) of Online Digital Content? The Critical Role of Information, Emotion, and Brand Prominence.” Journal of Marketing, vol. 83, no. 4, Apr. 2019, pp. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242919841034
This peer-reviewed article cited by 237 people on Google Scholar is the result of the collaboration among Author Gerard J. Tellis, a professor and director of the Center for Global Innovation at Marshall School of Business, Deborah J. MacInnis, a Charles L. and Ramona I. Hilliard Professor of business administration and marketing at Marshall School of Business, Seshadri Tirunillai, an assistant professor at C.T. Bauer College of Business, and Yanwei Zhang, a Staff Data Scientist at Uber Technologies Inc. The authors’ credentials indicate that this is a more business-focused article and focused majorly on online ads. Their article tested their six hypotheses on theoretical virality factors: information density, purchase risks, emotions, plots, brand placement, and length. According to their research, positive emotions, drama elements, and rich information at high purchase risks seem to be the most significant, if not the only, factors that help boost virality as they create the self, social, and altruistic motivations. This peer-reviewed article provides a very in-depth look into the factors it mentioned. However, their hypothesis may not capture all aspects of human choice and emotions — they generalized and categorized them too much. Also, the limited sample size with their “coders” may present some biases.
This journal article offered ideas on six sub-categories of “spirits of the original content.” Part of it presents a major counter-argument to [3] on this list, saying that high- and low-arousal emotions have no visible difference in motivating sharing. The already-rich information related to online ads makes me consider focusing on viral online video ads only rather than the broader “viral videos.” It also helps me extend the design of the “Möbius strip of virality” by including factors causing virality between “Seeing” and “Sharing” and inspires me to construct my arguments based on this “strip.”
[5]. Quesenberry, Keith A., and Michael K. Coolsen. “Drama Goes Viral: Effects of Story Development on Shares and Views of Online Advertising Videos.” Journal of Interactive Marketing, vol. 48, no. 1, May 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2019.05.001.
Author Keith A. Quesenberry is a marketing professor and researcher at Messiah College, while Michael K. Coolsen is a professor of marketing at Shippensburg University. Just like the previous two sources, the two professors’ positions and focused research area indicate that this article is focused more on a business perspective. It has been cited only 35 times, according to Google Scholar. However, these relatively fewer citations could be due to the smaller institutions the professors come from and may not be an indicator of lower accuracy. Their peer-reviewed article presented the research result after analyzing 155 viral marketing videos: those videos with drama or full storyline development usually gain more reviews and shares.
This article sheds light on a critical aspect of the internal factor, “spirits of the original content.” It presents the extension of one of the arguments (plots and drama) of the article [4], and unlike the comprehensive article [4], this article can provide me with a more in-depth view of this aspect. It specifically mentioned the process of “reach,” which contained “finding” and “sharing.” This description inspired me to construct the “Möbius strip of virality,” the overall focus of my research project. It also helps me argue that the strip is the “secret” behind virality.