Virality, by the numbers
Former Slide PM Yen Lee just blogged about The Four Viral App Objectives (via Dave McClure). It’s a great metrics-based analysis of the factors that contribute to virality. Whether you’re building FB apps or marketing physical goods, this is worthwhile reading.
“Infection duration” just rubs me the wrong way, though. Yes, it’s critical to computing virality, but it implies a focus on the acquisition of users solely for the purpose of acquisition of users. As long as someone is using your app they are infectious. The focus should be on prolonging engagement, not “infection.” Semantic debate? Probably.
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Comments
Comment from Yee Lee
Time: January 16, 2008, 6:14 pm
Thanks for the linkback.
Apologies if the usage of viral terminology is a bit, uh, *morbid* at times. Makes it all seem like such a gruesome sport. 
In any case, yeah, you’re right. No matter how important I may think it is to understand and exercise viral engineering techniques, virality by itself is still just another distribution channel. So virality absolutely has to be integrated with delivery of real consumer value (the “viral payload”, even!) in order to create sustainable apps. Note that users are generally pretty good at “voting with their eyeballs” — viral apps can generate huge surges of pageviews during periods of active viral growth, but they inevitably reach population saturation. At that point, if an app doesn’t really retain and engage its users, its traffic will decay just as quickly as it grew. (We’ve seen a few examples of this kind of decay already from the most popular apps that came out of the Stanford class.)
Comment from bpm140
Time: January 30, 2008, 11:17 am
Yee — Sorry for the long delay in approving your comment. Akismet false positive.
No worries on the term “viral”, I have no issue with it. The rest of your comment speaks for itself. Well said.
Comment from Ian Kennedy
Time: January 16, 2008, 8:14 am
I agree, it’s an unfortunate comparison. Yet, a truly successful virus must move beyond infection and keep it’s host alive so that it can spread itself further. In this sense, the app has to be engaging so people continue to use it (not get tired of it) and tell their friends about it or, so subtle and core to the utility of the host that people forget about it and don’t uninstall it while others continue to get exposed.