Maybe a better example would have been something like market success or how one can dispel things like “I hate this game and its basically broken and everyone who likes it is dumb”. Wisdom of the Crowds sort of says if millions of people like something, then maybe there’s something there to like. — Darniaq, on his blog



I’ve been meaning to write broadly on the subject of “the future of content” for a while now. And a huge part of that topic is tied in with the question of “what is popularity, and what does it mean, anyway?” Darniaq’s throwaway comment, along with this post on the Long Tail blog gives me an excuse to dig a little bit at that.



Darniaq is referencing, in part, this earlier post of mine in which I discuss The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

My immediate reaction is that the wisdom of crowds isn’t everything. Let’s look at examples…

Let us consider the case of Eleanor Hodgeman Porter. You probably don’t know who she was. She lived from 1868 to 1920, and wrote a lot of books. Books that cumulatively sold millions of copies, such as Miss Billy, her first bestseller. Her big hit, however, was Pollyanna. Published in a first edition in 1913, it had sold a million copies by 1919 or so, and it’s still in print today. It had its first stage production on Broadway in 1915, and it’s been filmed a few times, both as silent movies and as a Disney movie starring Hayley Mills.

As of right now, my book is outselling Pollyanna on Amazon, by quite a lot. In fact, my book actually has a higher average review. Now, this doesn’t mean much, to my mind. Is my book better than Pollyanna? Will it be read longer? Somehow, I doubt it. Pollyanna opened big, and AToF did not.

On the other hand, what has been the lasting contribution to culture from Pollyanna? Not to be too down on old Eleanor, but the major lasting effect of the book seems to have been the coinage of the word “pollyanna,” which is a derogatory term for people who do what the heroine of the book does: look optimistically at the world. What we have here is a classic whose central worldview is derided so much that it has entered the language meaning the opposite of the author’s intention!

What does the widsom of crowds tell us about Pollyanna? Is it possible that this enduring classic of children’s literature is in fact “broken” in Darniaq’s terms? Which aspect of the wisdom of crowds do we trust — the ongoing sales and impressive lifetime record the title has racked up, or the popular conception of the work that has such a firm hold on the collective cultural brain?

Of course, one might say that the teen years of last century were simply a sunnier time (at least, prior to the Great War), and we have grown more cynical since then. That the wisdom of crowds effectively changes over time. What does this mean for popularity? Consider the saga of poor Percy Marks’ book The Plastic Age, which isn’t even available on Amazon anymore. It was the #2 fiction bestseller of 1924 and was filmed in 1925.

Then, it basically vanished. In 1980 it reappears as part of a book series entitled “Lost American Fiction.” Here we have an author whose papers were considered important enough that they are held by Yale, who wrote 17 books and was published by Harper’s and The Saturday Evening Post. The Plastic Age was in fact the #5 most-purchased book of fiction by libraries in its year of publication.

But it was Britney Spears. The “college novel” was undergoing a boom, and Marks’ book was sexually explicit, for the day. None of the reviews cited literary quality. The book had no “legs.”

One of the interesting things about how popularity works is the “open big” phenomenon. It’s best illustrated by a curve that looks like this:

This curve is incredibly familiar these days: it’s the curve showing number of moviegoers over time to a film release, the number of games sold per day of release, the number of hits to a website after a major PR push, and so on and on and on. What this curve is showing is that in a hit-driven world, you get most of your folks checking you out on the first day, certainly in the first week. And after that, you slowly slide down the radar until you’re in niche-land. Your status as a “bestseller” essentially depends on how slowly the slide happens. What’s your “legs”?

If the curve looks familiar from other contexts, it’s probably because it looks like the Long Tail. And indeed, on the sidebar of that wonderful blog, we find an excerpt from this New York Times article saying,

In most cases, nearly half of a movie’s total audience turns out in the first week of release, which means there has been very little or no word of mouth motivating most of the audience. In other words, many people go to a movie without any real information about it – without even reading a review. Or, put most cynically: Most of the time, there is no relationship between how good a film is, and how many people turn out to see it.

What is the wisdom of crowds telling us then? That we’re suckers for a marketing campaign?

Ah, but it’s not that simple. If you look at books on word-of-mouth marketing or even books on network graph theory or books on the psychology of influence you’ll see just how vulnerable we are to what gets called everything from “preferential link attachment” to “being a lemming” — to wit, the fact that we tend to do what others do. Over and over again, market research has shown that marketing itself is really low on the list of reasons to buy something. Usually, the reason you buy something is because a friend tells you to because they are an active user of the product — and the reason they have for having bought it may be no better. This means that large products tend to get larger, as long as users don’t expire out quickly. Over time, this can lead to market stagnation, as one dominant product locks in users and acquires a monopoly. A first-mover advantage can be significant here.

The classic word-of-mouth adoption curve looks very different from the “open big” curve. A book that was the #1 bestseller for two solid years in the early 1970’s had this sort of curve: Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Richard Bach’s book is, in fact, outselling my book even to this day, even though it was rejected by over 20 publishers before seeing the light of day, was greeted by derisive reviews (Publisher’s Weekly commented that it was “a mite too icky poo”), and had basically no advertising budget.

We’re actually seeing a few games in the online space today that are following J-curves: Runescape, Second Life, Eve Online… games with legs, that didn’t open big, but are spreading virally.

What does all this add up to? Well, in my opinion, it adds up to the notion that just because millions of people like something doesn’t mean that it isn’t broken, or that people aren’t dumb for liking it. And conversely, there may be things that everyone agrees are great, but that don’t have popularity. In a hit-driven world, popularity is ephemeral and means very little. The real questions come over the long haul, and maybe it’s there that the wisdom of crowds can emerge. But on short spans of time, the wisdom of crowds is just as vulnerable to lemming-like behavior as anything else.

The trifecta is something that opens fairly well, builds via word of mouth, and retains interest over a long enough span of time that it “stays in print” and continues to draw an audience year after year after year. This aligns nicely with the ideal business growth of an MMO, I think.

This is running long enough, and I am way way late for dinner, so I’ll stop here. But at some point I want to cycle back and talk about whether the gradual demise of hit-driven culture means that the ephemerality of entertainment is going to get worse rather than better. In a world of niche-only entertainment, are cultural artifacts increasingly disposable? What does that mean for the content creators?

This post wouldn’t have been possible without this wonderful resource.