New research from Michele Coscia of Harvard University goes so far as to suggest a decision tree -- which is sort of like a flow chart -- that can show at any given point in an internet meme's life how likely it is to go viral. In order to generate this chart, Coscia tracked 178,801 variants of 499 memes, all gathered from what is arguably the internet's biggest clearinghouse for memes, Quickmeme.

Michele Coscia

This decision tree is a bit challenging to parse, but here goes. The number at the top, 35.47%, is the total proportion of all the memes Coscia analyzed that were "successful." By his definition, success meant receiving a high enough score on Memebase, where users can vote a meme up or down. (His threshold for "success" was necessarily somewhat arbitrary.)

Among these successful memes, an interesting phenomenon emerges. Those that hit an above-average peak of popularity at some point in their life were less likely, overall, to ultimately break the "success" threshold. Memes that were shared more consistently over time, rather than a great deal all at once, were more likely to ultimately rack up enough points.

In the attention economy, memes do battle to the death

If you think Nature is red in tooth and claw, you have yet to stare longingly at a website's analytics dashboard, quietly willing an article you wrote to go viral. (Not that anyone at Quartz has ever done this.) In the attention economy, memes compete for a finite pool of attention, representing all the time everyone spends on the internet. Which means that for one meme to become popular, some other meme must pass into obscurity.

Coscia's data crunching revealed that memes that were "more competitive" than others -- that is, whose rise in popularity tended to correlate with the fall in popularity of other memes -- were more likely to succeed overall.

But memes that travel in packs do best of all

Coscia identified a number of "meme organisms" -- clusters of memes that tend to do well together. He doesn't speculate about why, exactly, these memes' fates seem to be linked together, but a look at meme cluster #45, consisting of two memes (the average number in a cluster was 4.8) suggests a strange sort of logic to their linkage.

(Michele Coscia)

Perhaps (this is my speculation) one interpretation of meme organisms is that certain memes seem to capture the zeitgeist. Thus, memes could have seasonal patterns, or even follow the anxieties and fads of the day, as suggested by trends in the news. Or perhaps memes that remind you of one another do well because they feed off one another's attention. Just as genres emerge in music, literature and art, so too in internet memes.

Memes have a life of their own, independent of who shares them



Coscia notes that most previous research on how things go viral has sought to map the social interconnections of those who are sharing content. Thus, studies of how news is shared on, say, Twitter seek to map who are the most influential sharers of information in any given news cycle.