A Metric for Measuring Members´ Contribution to Information Propagation in Social Network Sites

The phenomenon of propagation is universal in our daily life. For example, infectious diseases can be transmitted from one person to another, hot news is disseminated widely on the Internet, and classic passages written by the popular users can be shared by many other users in online social network sites. With the emerging of online social network sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr, many literatures try to analyse patterns of information propagation and design effective virtual marketing strategies in these sites. However, few metrics have been designed to measure the characteristic of information propagation. In this paper, we propose a novel metric for measuring members´ contribution to information propagation in online social network sites. As a case, we analyse large-scale traces of members´ contribution to photo dissemination in Flickr and find that the distribution of members´ contribution follows a power law distribution, which reveals that most of the information is created and propagated by a few members.