Predict how popular your Instagram photo will be
Source: Skin Tighteners
A model of content sharing online. (Image courtesy Stanford)
A bit of sage advice: if you want your Instagram feed to go viral, don’t snap photos of space heaters or spatulas.
That’s according to Aditya Khosla, a PhD candidate and researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Khosla has developed an algorithm that can analyze elements of an individual photo and determine how popular it might be even before it’s shared. You can even try it out for yourself, on a website he created here.
Khosla crunched through 2.3 million Flickr photos in order to isolate both elements of the image and social context that help make a photo popular. Some takeaways: images that include miniskirts, bikinis, perfume and revolvers tend toward popularity. The aforementioned space heaters and spatulas not so much.
At the moment, a science-backed understanding of what makes something go viral is a hot commodity, valuable in improving everything from product marketing to the study of human behavior. So far, though, there has been little success in predicting how popular content will be before it has been shared in the first place.
| }
|