Social Influence and the Diffusion of User Created Content

Social in uence determines to a large extent what we adopt and when we adopt it. This is just as true in the digi- tal domain as it is in real life, and has become of increas- ing importance due to the deluge of user-created content on the Internet. In this paper, we present an empirical study of user-to-user content transfer occurring in the context of a time-evolving social network in Second Life, a massively multiplayer virtual world. We identify and model social in uence based on the change in adoption rate following the actions of one's friends and nd that the social network plays a signicant role in the adoption of content. Adoption rates quicken as the number of friends adopting increases and this eect varies with the connectivity of a particular user. We further nd that sharing among friends occurs more rapidly than sharing among strangers, but that content that diuses primarily through social in uence tends to have a more lim- ited audience. Finally, we examine the role of individuals, nding that some play a more active role in distributing content than others, but that these in uencers are distinct from the early adopters.