Content, Spreadable Practices
“Spreadability” refers to the technical resources that make it easier to circulate some kinds of content than others, the economic structures that support or restrict circulation, the attributes of a media text that might appeal to a community’s motivation for sharing material, and the social networks that link people through the exchange of meaningful bytes.
Our use of “spreadability” is perhaps most effective as a corrective to the ways in which the concept of “stickiness” has developed over time to measure success in online commerce. A term that emerged through marketing discourse and which was popularized by its use in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (2000) and elsewhere, “stickiness” broadly refers to the need to create content that attracts audience attention and engagement. Gladwell proposes, “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it” (2000, 132). Gladwell uses “stickiness” to describe the aspects of media texts which engender deep audience engagement and might motivate them to share what they learned with others. In short, to Gladwell, sticky content is material that people want to spread.
As online business models have been built, the use of “stickiness” in the business setting refers to centralizing the audience’s presence in a particular online location to generate advertising revenue or sales. This notion of stickiness closely resembles the “impressions” model that has shaped the measurement of audiences for broadcast content. In broadcast media, impressions are measured by how many people see a particular piece of media, whereas stickiness refers to the mechanisms motivating people to seek out and spend time at a particular site. Applied to the design of a website, companies hope to achieve stickiness by placing material in an easily measured location and assessing how many people view it, how many times it is viewed, and how long visitors view it.
Under the stickiness model, companies gain economic value by offering merchandise through some kind of e-commerce catalog, charging for access to information (through some kind of subscription or service fee), or selling the eyeballs of site visitors to some outside party, most often advertisers. Such advertising deals are sold by juxtaposing advertising messages on a page alongside content, and advertising rates are based on the number of impressions a page generates or the number of clicks an ad receives. This conception of stickiness focuses on monitoring and generating specific data on the actions of each site visitor.
This mindset has also come to define the way companies understand the popularity of content online. Online publications look at which articles are viewed the most and which hold people’s attention the longest. Media companies assess which videos are viewed the most and longest. Nonprofits and corporate websites alike define success online based on web traffic. Audiences themselves often think about the popularity of content in terms of views at a particular destination. In short, even beyond the instances when advertising deals are being brokered, this narrow definition of “stickiness” has provided the logic by which success has come to be understood.
Stickiness capitalizes on the easiest way companies have found to conduct business online—rather than the ways audiences want to and do experience material online. It privileges putting content in one place and making audiences come to it so they can be counted. Such “destination viewing” often conflicts with both the dynamic browsing experience of individual Internet users and, more importantly, with the circulation of content through the social connections of audience members.
What we mean by “spreadability” will become clearer by contrasting it with this stickiness model. We compare the terms here not to indicate that web traffic shouldn’t matter or to suggest that spreadability is the “opposite” of stickiness, but rather to demonstrate the limits of models too closely focused on stickiness.
The Migrations of Individuals versus the Flow of Ideas • Like other impressions-based constructs, stickiness models focus on counting isolated audience members. Spreadability recognizes the importance of the social connections among individuals, connections increasingly made visible (and amplified) by social media platforms. This approach may still include quantitative measures of how frequently and broadly content travels, but it makes important actively listening to the way media texts are taken up by audiences and circulate through audience interactions.
Centralized versus Dispersed Material • Because deep quantitative audience measurement is at the center of stickiness, online destinations can become a virtual “roach motel.” For instance, at an extreme, some sites disable the Back button, making it difficult for users to escape once they have stumbled on the site, without closing their browser. The key to stickiness is putting material in a centralized location, drawing people to it, and keeping them there indefinitely in ways that best benefit the site’s analytics. (The process is not that unlike a corral; audiences are pushed along predefined routes matching a publisher’s measurement needs and are then poked and prodded for analytics data.) Spreadability emphasizes producing content in easy-to-share formats, such as the embed codes that YouTube provides, which make it easier to spread videos across the Internet, and encouraging access points to that content in a variety of places.
Unified versus Diversified Experiences • A sticky mentality requires brands to create a centralized experience which can best serve the purposes of multiple audiences simultaneously, offering limited and controlled ways for individuals to “personalize” content within a site’s format. A spreadable mentality focuses on creating media texts that various audiences may circulate for different purposes, inviting people to shape the context of the material as they share it within their social circles.
Prestructured Interactivity versus Open-Ended Participation • Sticky sites often incorporate games, quizzes, and polls to attract and hold the interests of individuals. The participatory logic of spreadability leads to audiences using content in unanticipated ways as they retrofit material to the contours of their particular community. Such activities are difficult for creators to control and even more difficult to quantify.
Attracting and Holding Attention versus Motivating and Facilitating Sharing • Since sticky business models are built on demographic data, audiences are often constructed as a collection of passive individuals. Spreadability, by contrast, values the activities of audience members to help generate interest in particular brands or franchises.
Scarce and Finite Channels versus Myriad Temporary (and Localized) Networks • Stickiness retains the broadcast mentality of one-to-many communication, with authorized official channels competing against one another for the audience’s attention. The spreadability paradigm assumes that anything worth hearing will circulate through any and all available channels, potentially moving audiences from peripheral awareness to active engagement.
Sales Force Marketing to Individuals versus Grassroots Intermediaries Advocating and Evangelizing • By “grassroots intermediaries,” we mean unofficial parties who shape the flow of messages through their community and who may become strong advocates for brands or franchises. Grassroots intermediaries may often serve the needs of content creators, demonstrating how audiences become part of the logic of the marketplace and challenging what “grassroots” means, as such activities often coexist or even coincide with corporate agendas. They are not, however, employed or regulated by content creators and also may act counter to corporate goals.
Separate and Distinct Roles versus Collaboration across Roles • In a stickiness model, it’s clear who the “producer,” the “marketer,” and the “audience” is. Each performs a separate and distinct purpose. In a spreadable model, there is not only an increased collaboration across these roles but, in some cases, a blurring of the distinctions between these roles.
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While stickiness may provide
