News flash: The jailed Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot “did not gain international fame through their musicality per se.”
That insight—none too surprising if you’ve ever clicked on a Pussy Riot video on YouTube—appears in an academic paper (pdf) by three electronic-commerce researchers from the University of Texas, Austin. The 45-page paper, filled with equations and Greek letters, explains how being deliberately offensive can help a video break through the clutter on YouTube, where 72 hours’ worth of video are uploaded every minute.
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