Viral Ad Network

Just over a year ago, I ran some basic simulations of content “going viral” across various social graphs.

In particular, I tested two different parameters – how likely users are to send content to another person, and the ratio of  “undirected connections” to “directed connections” in the graph.

How likely users are to send content on is a simple property to imagine, but if connections are directed or not is a more abstract concept…

In essence, this ratio measured the question “if Alice could send a viral to Bob, could Bob send this viral to Alice”.

The two extremes I gave at the time were Facebook and Bloggers – Facebook is at the “undirected” end (and was even more so at the time) – if Alice is friends with Bob on facebook, then Bob is friends with Alice.

Blogs were on the other end – if Alice reads Bob’s blog, then there’s no reason to assume that Bob reads Alices blog.

The results of the simulation (run on a population the same size as the UK) looked like this (dark red means more people see the content)

Why does the ratio of undirected connections to directed connections matter so much? Well imagine Alice sends a great new ad to Bob – Bob now decides to send it to all his friends – but Alice has already seen it, so she’s not going to send it to anyone else.

Clearly the same thing happens with what’s know as “connectedness” – i.e. if Alice is connected to Bob, and Bob is connected to Charlie, what is the chance that Charlie is connected to Alice?

… which brings us nicely back to the Viral Ad Network

- by spreading content to a large number of (otherwise unconnected) websites through the Viral Ad Network, advertisers can reach largely unconnected groups of people, who can (in turn) spread the content to their friends – with less chance of those friends overlapping – reducing the chance they have already seen the content, and giving great content a chance to spread further.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Advertisers, Viral Ad Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.