Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have extensively studied The New York Times list of most e-mailed articles, checking every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles, and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page, The New York Times reports.

Results from the study show that NYTimes readers have exalted tastes - seeking to inspire awe in their friends, colleagues, and family by choosing to e-mail positive articles over negative ones, and long, intellectually challenging articles over short and shocking ones.
Penn researchers, Jonah Berger, and Katherine A. Milkman, started studying awe, after they noticed how many science articles made the most-emailed list. In general, they found 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times homepage made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines, like "The Promise and Power of RNA."

Dr. Berger, a marketing professor at Penn's Wharton School, noticed science kept doing better than expected. "We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You'd see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision."

To organize the data on popularity, the Penn researchers tracked more than 7,500 articles published from August 2008 to February 2009. They assessed each article's "virality", as NYT's John Tierney explains, after controlling for factors like time of day it was published online, the section in which it appeared and how much promotion it received on the homepage.

A random sample of 3,000 of these articles was rated by independent readers for qualities like providing practical value or being surprising, while a computer algorithm tracked the ratio of emotional words in an article to asses its relative positivity or negativity.

The study found that more emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, and positive articles were shared more often than negative ones. Longer articles, perhaps contrarily to what some may believe, were more popular than shorter articles, but probably because they were usually about more engaging topics.

Surprising articles that could shock readers did relatively well as did the anxiety-inducing ones, but the number of quality articles that were emailed was very high. Dr. Berger explained it in this matter, "an article about square watermelons is surprising, but it doesn't inspire that awed feeling that the world is a broad place and I'm so small."

Penn researchers have previously defined this emotion as the emotion of "self-transcedence", which refers to feeling an admiration or an elevation in the face of something greater than the self. For them, awe-inspiring articles - so popular among readers - have a large scale and require the reader to view the world in a different way.

But, why do people e-mail these articles to their close ones, be it useful tips or awe-inspiring insights? Penn researchers Berger and Milkman offer certain explanations. First, people share tips or advice that make sense according to classic economic utility theory: I give you something of practical value in the hope that you'll someday return the favor. Second, people may send certain articles to show off how well-informed they are. Third, and most important in the case of these grand articles that reveal something previously unknown about the world is that people may be "seeking emotional communion."

This study sheds additional light on the increasing importance of users sharing content and of personalized news. Social networks have also gained an important role in allowing users to share news content. Just last week, Hitwise reported that Facebook was rivaling Google as a distributor of news on the Internet. Facebook was ranked as the fourth most popular source of visits to news and media websites, highlighting the importance of individual users and social networks in spreading news content online.