http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/persistence/persistence.pdf How persistence does not lead to success A hallmark of the attention economy is the competition for the attention of others in information rich environments. Thus people persistently upload content to social media sites, hoping for the highly unlikely outcome of topping the charts and reaching a wide audience. And yet, an analysis of the production histories and success dynamics of 10 million videos from Youtube revealed that the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold. This paradoxical result is further compounded by the fact that the average quality of submissions does increase with the number of uploads, and also that the likelihood success is less than that of playing a lottery. Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman 2009-03-21 00:33:00 attention persistence success social computing lotteries youtube