On the Virality of Animated GIFs on Tumblr

TL;DR

This study analyzes the virality of animated GIFs on Tumblr, revealing they are more discoverable, tend to go viral more often, and are more predictable in their virality compared to other content types.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive quantitative analysis of animated GIF virality on Tumblr, highlighting unique features that contribute to their popularity and predictability.

Findings

Animated GIFs are more searchable via hashtags than other content.

GIFs tend to go viral more frequently than images and videos.

GIF virality is more predictable than that of images and videos.

Abstract

Animated GIFs are becoming increasingly popular in online communication. People use them to express emotion, share their interests and enhance (or even replace) short-form texting; they are a new means to tell visual stories. Some creative animated GIFs are highly addictive to watch, and eventually become viral -- they circulate rapidly and widely within the network. What makes certain animated GIFs go viral? In this paper, we study the virality of animated GIFs by analyzing over 10 months of complete data logs (more than 1B posts and 12B reblogs) on Tumblr, one of the largest repositories of animated GIFs on the Internet. We conduct a series of quantitative and comparative studies on Tumblr data, comparing major types of online content -- text, images, videos, and animated GIFs. We report on a number of interesting, new findings on animated GIFs. We show that people tend to make animated GIFs easily searchable and discoverable by adding more hashtags than other content types. We also show that animated GIFs tend to go more viral than images and videos on Tumblr. With more in-depth analysis, we present that animated GIFs tend to get reblogged more and followed more from non-followers, while animated GIFs have more recurrence of a post. Lastly, we show that the virality of animated GIFs is more easily predictable than that of images and videos.