Modeling and Predicting the Growth and Death of Membership-based Websites

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reaction-diffusion-decay model that effectively describes and predicts the growth and decline of membership-based websites, enabling classification of their sustainability and growth drivers.

Contribution

It presents a novel mathematical model that captures both success and failure dynamics of websites and offers automatic classification based on DAU data.

Findings

Model accurately fits observed DAU time series.

Can classify websites as sustainable or unsustainable.

Identifies primary growth drivers such as marketing or word-of-mouth.

Abstract

Driven by outstanding success stories of Internet startups such as Facebook and The Huffington Post, recent studies have thoroughly described their growth. These highly visible online success stories, however, overshadow an untold number of similar ventures that fail. The study of website popularity is ultimately incomplete without general mechanisms that can describe both successes and failures. In this work we present six years of the daily number of users (DAU) of twenty-two membership-based websites - encompassing online social networks, grassroots movements, online forums, and membership-only Internet stores - well balanced between successes and failures. We then propose a combination of reaction-diffusion-decay processes whose resulting equations seem not only to describe well the observed DAU time series but also provide means to roughly predict their evolution. This model allows an approximate automatic DAU-based classification of websites into self-sustainable v.s. unsustainable and whether the startup growth is mostly driven by marketing & media campaigns or word-of-mouth adoptions.