Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

When you share something online, you are giving up nothing. In fact, you are gaining something quite valuable: an audience.

Picking a few hits requires a tolerance for many bad ideas, mediocre ideas, and even good ideas cursed with bad timing. Above all, it requires a business model that supports the inevitability that most new things fail; the most promising ideas often attract a chorus of skeptics; and one big hit can pay for a thousand flops.

Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.

Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic, curious to discover new things, and deeply neophobic, afraid of anything that is too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises

The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Quality, it seems, is a necessary, but insufficient attribute for success.

To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar