2013/07/04 by Bruno Ribeiro, Ribeiro, Bruno · 1 citation
Decision Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Innovation Diffusion and Forecasting #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1307.1354
openalex publication_date 2013/07/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Driven by outstanding success stories of Internet startups such as Facebook\nand The Huffington Post, recent studies have thoroughly described their growth.\nThese highly visible online success stories, however, overshadow an untold\nnumber of similar ventures that fail. The study of website popularity is\nultimately incomplete without general mechanisms that can describe both\nsuccesses and failures. In this work we present six years of the daily number\nof users (DAU) of twenty-two membership-based websites - encompassing online\nsocial networks, grassroots movements, online forums, and membership-only\nInternet stores - well balanced between successes and failures. We then propose\na combination of reaction-diffusion-decay processes whose resulting equations\nseem not only to describe well the observed DAU time series but also provide\nmeans to roughly predict their evolution. This model allows an approximate\nautomatic DAU-based classification of websites into self-sustainable v.s.\nunsustainable and whether the startup growth is mostly driven by marketing &\nmedia campaigns or word-of-mouth adoptions.\n