![News flash: The jailed Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot “did not gain international fame through their musicality per se.” (via The Economics of Pussy Riot on YouTube - Businessweek)
That insight—none too surprising if you’ve ever clicked on a Pussy Riot video on YouTube—appears in anacademic paper (pdf) by three electronic-commerce researchers from the University of Texas, Austin. The 45-page paper, filled with equations and Greek letters, explains how being deliberately offensive can help a video break through the clutter on YouTube, where 72 hours’ worth of video are uploaded every minute. “Most viewers were drawn to [their] videos out of curiosity,” not a desire to watch a high-quality clip, write professor Andrew Whinston and PhD students Liangfei Qiu and Qian Tang.
Not everyone aspires to be Pussy Riot, which staged such provocations as trespassing in a Russian Orthodox Church—a performance that drew two-year prison sentences for three band members. But Whinston, an economist who is a professor of management science and information systems, says it’s important for marketers to understand the various qualities that make one video go viral and another go unnoticed.
The University of Texas paper explains the two reasons people click on a video that lots of other people have clicked on. One is “social learning”; the fact that others have watched it tells you it must be good. A very different reason is “network effect”; whether the video is good or not, it becomes more valuable to watch it if others are watching it. It then becomes a topic of conversation—and the more people have seen it, the livelier the conversation.
In the introduction to their paper, the authors quote Malraux on Picasso: “You’ve got to create images they won’t accept. Make them foam at the mouth. Force them to understand that they’re living in a pretty queer world.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mav7fxdQcV1qzh8lfo1_500.jpg)
News flash: The jailed Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot “did not gain international fame through their musicality per se.” (via The Economics of Pussy Riot on YouTube - Businessweek)
- That insight—none too surprising if you’ve ever clicked on a Pussy Riot video on YouTube—appears in anacademic paper (pdf) by three electronic-commerce researchers from the University of Texas, Austin. The 45-page paper, filled with equations and Greek letters, explains how being deliberately offensive can help a video break through the clutter on YouTube, where 72 hours’ worth of video are uploaded every minute. “Most viewers were drawn to [their] videos out of curiosity,” not a desire to watch a high-quality clip, write professor Andrew Whinston and PhD students Liangfei Qiu and Qian Tang.
- Not everyone aspires to be Pussy Riot, which staged such provocations as trespassing in a Russian Orthodox Church—a performance that drew two-year prison sentences for three band members. But Whinston, an economist who is a professor of management science and information systems, says it’s important for marketers to understand the various qualities that make one video go viral and another go unnoticed.
- The University of Texas paper explains the two reasons people click on a video that lots of other people have clicked on. One is “social learning”; the fact that others have watched it tells you it must be good. A very different reason is “network effect”; whether the video is good or not, it becomes more valuable to watch it if others are watching it. It then becomes a topic of conversation—and the more people have seen it, the livelier the conversation.
- In the introduction to their paper, the authors quote Malraux on Picasso: “You’ve got to create images they won’t accept. Make them foam at the mouth. Force them to understand that they’re living in a pretty queer world.”
