Viral Growth Factor – Elevating your Z Factor with Valuable Content

This weekend I happened on a great little article on the Mixpanel blog. The article takes a formulaic approach to determining how ‘viral’ an application or channel might be. Their formula is very intriguing.

Their formula: X*Y*Z = Viral Growth Factor

X = % of users who invite other people.

Y = average # of people that they invited.

Z = % of users who accepted an invitation.

A viral growth factor greater than 1 means the application or channel has an exponential organic user acquisition.

The author of the article, Suhail Doshl, maintains that:

“If your visitor retention is so low eventually you can fatigue users so much that your Z (acceptance percentage) can start to fall. This is what happened to lots of application companies. they invited 100s of users but the acceptance rate started to dwindle but when they had millions of users, those users rarely came back and eventually these companies hit a saturation point where their user-base declines everyday. Make sure your product has a high X (which can correlate to user value) or have a plan to attain it.”

Now, Suhail clearly understands that if your product has a high ‘X Factor’ you should have a high ‘Y-Factor.’ However, this is not true unless the content offered on the platform is of the highest quality. Suhail focuses on providing examples of ‘applications’ that depend on viral activity for growth, like a Facebook application. I’d like to take a look at how this kind of formula can be used to determine the quality of content (or QOC).

So, how do you know if your content is high quality? Well, you can actually use Suhail’s formula. For the sake of this example I’ve redefined the Y and Z factors:

Y =  # of people that they invited.

Z = # of users who accepted an invitation.

We’ll look at ratios (Y:Z) to determine the value of content.

For example, if you see that the percentage of users who invite other people to view the content is very high, you can assume that a core audience finds your content to be valuable. However, if the ratio of number of people that they invited (‘Y-Factor’) to the number of users who accepted the invitation  (‘Z-Factor’) is disproportionate (10:1), you can assume that outside your core audience (friends and family) your content has a lower perceived value. The farther away from your core audience the invites go, the lower and lower your ‘Z-Factor,’ and the more disproportionate the ratio (50:1).

Here’s what your Viral Growth Chart might look like:

High Volume / Low-Value Content

Now, let’s look at a much more desired outcome when you’re providing high-value content to a more relevant audience at each round of interaction:

Low Volume / High-Value Content

As you can see, your content, although it is not ‘shared’ as widely, is consumed more relevantly, delivering your desired viral growth rate.

An Example in ElfYourSelf.com

In Suhail Doshl’s post he references the viral success of ElfYourSelf.com. ElfYourSelf enabled viewers to customize some holiday animation with photographs of their family and friends and send it virally using their system. Unlike most Facebook applications, ElfYourSelf was specifically designed to create content only relevant to a small audience. However, the nature of the application dictated that the content was highly relevant to that specific audience. That’s exactly why ElfYourSelf has a very high viral rate. Relevancy is the key to viral marketing.

Take This Away

So, if you’re looking to create valuable online content that is highly successful and designed to ‘go viral,’ you must be sure to you make the content relevant to your specific audience as it fans out through the consumption chain. Mixpanel’s formula is well thought out and can add tremendous value to helping you understand what’s relevant to your core audience and – even more importantly – how relevant your content is as it moves farther and farther away from your inner circle.

What do you think it takes to ‘go viral’? Let me know!

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."