Analyzing The Moment of Popping on Digg

One of the most fascinating moments in social media is when a story goes popular on Digg. Analyzing this moment is obviously of great interest, and so we now kick off a series of posts analyzing what actually happens at this magical moment.

The Data Set

The data discussed below is 1800 stories that Social Alerter has logged as going popular in the past few weeks.

Going Pop

The first thing to look at is how long it takes for a story to go popular on Digg. Everyone knows that it's about 24 hours and then there is no chance. Actually, that's mostly true.

The time (in hours) between submission and going popular was calculated for each story, rounded down to the nearest hour, tallied up, and plotted. The plot tells the whole story (click for full size):

As you can see, the huge majority of stories go popular within 24 hours, and then a chosen few make it up to 48 hours later. In future posts, I'll be looking at those stories that go popular after 24 hours in detail.

Care to Comment?

The other thing we can look at is the number of comments a story. The numbers tell a very surprising story: just over 90% of stories go popular with 6 comments or less. Of all stories, 24% go popular without any comments.

The chart below shows the number of stories going popular with a given number of comments. The line shows a cumulative percentage the sums up all categories up to that point. The quicker it hits the 100% mark (which is very quick!) the fewer the number of comments on average a story has on going popular.

Yep, very surprising result that will require further examination. At the very least, I'll repeat this test in a month's time to see if the pattern holds or not.

One thing to remember is that this counts all stories across all categories at all times of going popular.

That's it for now. Subscribe to this blog for more social media data mining!