Red, Purple and Pink: The Colors of Diffusion on Pinterest (Extract)

Recently, we have seen image-sharing communities truly take off — sites such as Pinterest, Imgur and Tumblr, just to name a few. A key research challenge for communities like these is uncovering the mechanisms by which content spreads from person to person (or “diffuses,” adopting the term from the academic literature). For example, a study of the most widely shared New York Times stories found that they tend to “inspire awe” in their readers. Drawing on a corpus of one million images crawled from Pinterest, we find that color significantly drives how far an image diffuses, even after partially controlling for user activity and network structure.