Viral Math

By: Felix Salmon | Reuters

The question: What on earth is Upworthy doing so right? How is it that Upworthy’s articles shared a good order of magnitude more often than anybody else’s?

Part of the answer is that Upworthy simply doesn’t publish that many articles overall — a couple of hundred a month, each one carefully and laboriously optimized, through extensive A/B testing, to be as socially infectious as possible.