online content. He wanted to see what made things contagious and
what kept them spreading.
Over the next few years, he would start to piece together features
that were important for online popularity. Like how jumping on
emerging news stories could drive traffic to websites. And how
polarising topics got more exposure, while ever-changing content
kept users coming back. His team even pioneered a ‘reblog’ feature
that allowed people to share others’ posts, a concept that would later
become fundamental to how things spread on social media (just
imagine how different Twitter would be without a retweet option, or
Facebook without a ‘share’ button). Peretti would eventually move
into news, helping to develop the Huffington Post, but those early
contagion experiments stuck in his mind. Eventually, he suggested to
his old boss at Eyebeam that they create a new kind of media
company. One that specialised in contagion, taking their insights
about popularity and applying them on a massive scale. The idea was
to compile a rolling stream of viral content. They called it BuzzFeed.
N published his work on small-world
networks, he joined the Department of Sociology at Columbia
University. During this period he became increasingly interested in
online content, eventually becoming an early advisor to BuzzFeed.
Although Watts had started off studying links in networks like film
casts and worm brains, the world wide web contained a wealth of
new data. In the early 2000s, Watts and his colleagues began to
explore these online connections. In the process, they would overturn
some long-held beliefs about how information spreads.
At the time, marketers were getting excited about the notion of
‘influencers’: everyday people who could spark social epidemics.
Nowadays, the word ‘influencer’ has evolved to refer to everything
from influential everyday people to celebrities and media
personalities. But the original concept involved little-known individuals
who can spark word-of-mouth outbreaks. The idea was that by
targeting a few unexpectedly well-connected people, companies
could get ideas to spread much further for much less cost. Rather
than relying on a celebrity like Oprah Winfrey to promote their