Would you be a fan, or like, a Facebook page if all they did was post the same picture over and over again every single day? If you answered no, there are 63,244 people who answered yes. Those 63,244 people are connected with the following Facebook page: “La stessa foto di Toto Cutugno ogni giorno” which translates to “The Same Photo of Toto Cutugno Every Day.”
The photo below, is the only photo on the entire Facebook page.
Toto Cutugno is a 71-year-old Italian singer, who had a huge hit that was a patriotic number that came out in 1983 which was an ode to his homeland. Toto Cutugno is surprisingly not a relevant Italian pop culture icon, yet his popular Facebook page is very busy. A popular Facebook page who only posts the same picture every day since August 21, 2014.
Seriously…
Sidenote. This is not the first time something like this, or social media platform, that has this kind of material. There is a Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook all dedicated to posting a single photo of Dave Coulier. Along with Jim Carrey (129,000 likes) and Morgan Freeman (16,000 likes).
The bizarre thing about the Cutugno Facebook page is that, no matter what, without fail, his picture gets about the same photo likes (around 1,500) and same photo comments each day. Because of this difference, it sparked some interested of some Italian researches at Italy’s IUSS Institute for Advanced Study to center an academic study on “La stessa foto di Toto Cutugno ogni giorno.” The study is called “Everyday the Same Picture: Popularity and Content Diversity.” It studies conspiracy theories on varied content of Facebook pages like this.
In summary, this study and these researches say pages with “heterogenous” content tend to see very different numbers and fluctuating page likes and comments on their posts. But Toto Cutugno’s page is the outlier. Meaning, there is a page with the same content every day and it is guaranteed to get the same amount of attention each day.
“Ogni giorno lo stesso — every day the same.”
Because of this, these researches claim they can predict how user engaged people will become on Facebook posts based on how different the posts are. This model looks the spectrum of posts and if everything is equally accessibly to posts that vary in clickability. Apparently, as the attractiveness of the Facebook page changes and the changes occur in the model, the researches can predict how much engagement the post or page will receive.
On the other hand. This Facebook page was created as a joke and got likes as a joke and is spread like a joke. So can this all really be predicted if its popularity stemmed from a joke? Are these researchers taking this Facebook page a little too far? I mean… there is the same kind of page for a cat. C’mon people.
Either way, this photo will not escape anyone’s memory any time soon.
[Photo credit: Facebook]
