Modeling Website Popularity Competition in the Attention-Activity Marketplace

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new model of website popularity competition based on the attention-activity marketplace, validated with user activity data, and capable of predicting long-term outcomes of competing websites.

Contribution

It presents a novel popularity competition model inspired by Facebook's impact on MySpace, incorporating user activity data to improve prediction accuracy.

Findings

Model accurately fits historical DAU data of Facebook and competitors.

Model successfully predicts website trajectories four years into the future.

Provides new insights into the dynamics of attention in online marketplaces.

Abstract

How does a new startup drive the popularity of competing websites into oblivion like Facebook famously did to MySpace? This question is of great interest to academics, technologists, and financial investors alike. In this work we exploit the singular way in which Facebook wiped out the popularity of MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, and Multiply to guide the design of a new popularity competition model. Our model provides new insights into what Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon called the "marketplace of attention," which we recast as the attention-activity marketplace. Our model design is further substantiated by user-level activity of 250,000 MySpace users obtained between 2004 and 2009. The resulting model not only accurately fits the observed Daily Active Users (DAU) of Facebook and its competitors but also predicts their fate four years into the future.