Popularity Of User-generated Content Research Articles

Influencers with #NoFilter: How micro-celebrities use self-branding practices on Instagram

The growth and popularity of user-generated content has created as a new form of celebrity known as ‘micro-celebrities.’ Micro-celebrities engage in strategic self-branding practices on social media through use of self-presentation strategies to attract and maintain a fan base. The study uses a content analysis to explore how micro-celebrities use self-presentation strategies (i.e., self-promotion, affiliation, and authenticity) on Instagram. Findings reveal that self-presentation strategies vary by gender and account types of micro-celebrities.

Popularity Brings Better Sales or Vice Versa: Evidence from Instagram and OpenTable

With the popularity of user-generated content (UGC), an increasing number of studies have investigated its impact on business performance. However, prior studies were limited to a single platform and showed the effects of UGC of a platform, for example, customer textual comments or customer numeral ratings, on sales/reservation of the same platform. In practice, users often refer to a UGC, for example, Instagram, and purchase it on other platforms. To incorporate the spillover effect, we considered the restaurant industry because it has active participation across various channels. Using topic modelling, we first identified from Instagram four topics of users’ interest regarding a restaurant, such as location, nightlife, food and celebration. From fixed effects models’ estimation, we found that (a) recommendation and mention of Instagram have positive effects, and (b) comments of location and food also have positive significant fixed effects, but (c) the impact of Instagram volume is curvilinear and positive significant effect the sales. Since the curvilinear effects may come from reverse causality, that is, higher reservation, might bring more customers and comments on social networking service (SNS) (echo verse effect in our paper). Therefore, we further analysed two-way Granger causality and panel vector autoregression to identify the endogeneity, and the results showed the existing Granger causality loop between OpenTable review and Instagram post volumes.

The from News Bearer to Extreme Speech Propagator: Analysis of Shifting Practice in Production and Distribution of News on the Internet

This research aims to examine the ways in which practices of information productions and distributions are shifting in the Internet era, particularly in the production of extreme speech that is claimed to be news. There are many information platforms on the Internet proclaimed as “news sites”, but instead of conveying valuable information to the readers, they are used to circulate opinionated pieces and propaganda. The popularity of user-generated content - where users were enabled not only to consume but also to produce and to distribute digital content - used to be hailed optimistically as a form of democratization that will to give chances to citizens to voice their social, economic, political, and cultural concerns. However, the recent development shows that the freedom and the easy-access offered by the Internet have been used to propagate negative content and sectarian sentiments. This research conducts analysis of ten ‘news outlets’ that were banned by Indonesian government (KOMINFO) that had been considered spreading hatred and sectarian spirit. This research will examine closely this so-called news in terms of their content, tone, and the parties that are confronted through the content. This research argues that the once embraced users-generated content as alternative news by citizen had evolved to be a form of extreme speech propagator.

A Point Process Framework for Predicting Popularity of Content in Online Social Networks

In this paper, we extend previous models to predict the popularity of user-generated content for online social networks (OSNs). We focus on Twitter as the most popular and widely used micro-blogging online social network, and specifically measure the popularity of a brand’s tweet by analyzing the time-series path of its subsequent activities (i.e. retweets, replies and marks as favorite) using multivariate marked Hawkes process models. Self and mutually exciting point process models as a multivariate class are adopted to simulate popularity growth patterns of brand post contents on Twitter. While previous self-exciting point process models aggregate the three types of events into one stream of information and therefore ignore exciting effects among different types of events, this study focuses on incorporating the event type into the predictive models for content popularity, explicitly looking at the effects of various types of users’ activities on Twitter. We aim to develop a mutually exciting point process model in order to incorporate such effects among different types of events. Our results suggest that the mutual-exciting point process model outperforms the self-exciting point process model to predict the popularity of online content, as it is able to capture mutual excitement effects and cross interactions between a sequence of events from one type to another. These results are useful in developing and executing a plan for online activities by the brand owners.

Recombinant Comedy, Transmedial Mobility, and Viral Video

Recombinant Comedy, Transmedial Mobility, and Viral Video David Gurney (bio) When Time named “You” the magazine’s 2006 person of the year—and included a functional mirror on the issue’s cover—it marked a watershed in the popularization of user-generated content (Grossman). Admittedly, there is some irony in pointing to such an old media stalwart as the bellwether of a cultural shift largely associated with new media, but it speaks to the inherent messiness of contemporary popular culture as it courses almost indiscriminately through the mediascape. More elaborate discussions of Web 2.0, convergence, and the rise of online participatory culture through Internet streaming video have been helpful in accounting for the mixed and transmedial nature of the swell in user-generated activities facilitated by networked digital media.1 Consequently, the term “viral” seems entirely appropriate as the popular description of how online videos travel from user to user and medium to medium. But is there anything that marks the user-generated texts that enjoy the highest degree of virality? By most measures, the most widely seen user-generated clip online as of late 2010 is the humble “Charlie Bit My Finger . . . Again!” (“100 Million Club”). With over a quarter billion views for the original YouTube upload alone, it ranked third on YouTube’s chart of all-time most-watched clips, falling just under music videos featuring Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga (“YouTube Charts”)—and all this attention has been directed toward a rather simple home video that captures, in just under one minute, a baby brother biting his older sibling’s finger in an unexpectedly forceful way. How might we begin to understand the popularity of such user-generated content within emerging online video culture? While one might point to the popularity of other baby videos or more generally “cute” videos, what links “Charlie” most directly with other user-generated viral videos is the shared element of comedy. The video might just as easily have found a mass audience through an airing on America’s Funniest Home Videos (or, more likely, the UK’s You’ve Been Framed, as the Davies-Carr family is English), but the affordances of networked digital media have allowed this humorous clip to spread much more widely than the audience for such programs would have allowed. The importance of this notion of “spreadable” content has prompted Henry Jenkins and other media researchers to endorse this designation as a more useful descriptor than “virality” (Jenkins et al., “If It Doesn’t Spread [Part One]”). Granted, the more outwardly positive connotations of spreadability give more hope to those seeking to master the unsettled waters of streaming content, but virality itself has taken a more positive gloss in recent years while still retaining a sense of unpredictability and even anarchy. Furthermore, there’s something about online comedy clips that is unmistakably “viral” in nature—specifically, the pervasive phenomenon of recombination. Just as the successful propagation of many biological viruses is a result of the ability of multiple viruses to “recombine” their genetic codes through intracellular replication, the successful propagation of many viral clips is a result of the ability for multiple cultural codes to be recombined with them and through them once they find an audience online. While many viewers likely encountered “Charlie” in the form of its initial upload, a significant aspect of its online popularity (and that of most other viral clips) is the ability of users to employ the video as raw material for their own versions, remixes, or mashups. With titles ranging from “Charlie Bit Me—Remix” to “Batman Bit My Finger (Charlie Bit My Finger Spoof),” there are over 150 official video responses posted to the clip’s YouTube page (“Charlie Bit My Finger—Again! Video Responses”). Jean Burgess has highlighted the integral [End Page 3] nature of such responses in her move to assert “the central role of cultural participation in the creation of cultural, social and economic value in participatory culture” (102). I would like to build from this necessary perspectival shift and augment it with a consideration of the primacy of humor in the participatory culture of viral video. I will briefly trace what has long made...