The Long Tail and Viral Marketing by Ryan Pitylak

May 9 2009 by admin in Ryan Pitylak |64 Comments

Jure Leskovec and his associates write an article about the long tail and viral marketing.  They present an analysis of a person-to-person recommendation network, consisting of 4 million people who made 16 million recommendations on half a million products.

They observe the propagation of recommendations and the cascade sizes, which we explain by a simple stochastic model. They analyze how user behavior varies within user communities defined by a recommendation network. Product purchases follow a ‘long tail’ where a significant share of purchases belongs to rarely sold items.

They establish how the recommendation network grows over time and how effective it is from the viewpoint of the sender and receiver of the recommendations.

While on average recommendations are not very effective at inducing purchases and do not spread very far, they present a model that successfully identifies communities, product, and pricing categories for which viral marketing seems to be very effective.

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