What Determines Viral Phenomenon? Views, Comments and Growth Indicators of TED Talk Videos

Viral phenomenon drives the business and marketing world to achieve an exponential growth through word-of-mouth diffusion process. The diversity of occurrence of the phenomenon, where a product, online videos, or information, technology, an idea or an event could go viral, pose challenge in measuring which performance measure truly captures viral phenomenon. We performed a measurement study using TED talk videos to identify which of the two performance measures, namely views and comments, truly captures and drives a viral phenomenon. We hypothesized that video comments would be a stronger indicator than video views to measure viral phenomenon. Our results reveal a strong correlation between the two video performance measures. However, video views better represents viral videos and therefore a valid indicator for the measurement of viral phenomenon. The insights can help business strategists and marketing managers in decision making on which performance measure needs business focus in driving virality.