howitspread/viral-events

How It Spread: the public record of viral events

1,309 viral events (films, products, brand campaigns, memes, songs, games and trends) with 19,732 dated timeline events: the first post, the first big account to pick it up, each jump to a new platform, the press, the peak, the backlash and the afterlife. Every case also carries its tagged spread mechanics and a Spread Score (0 to 100) computed from measured attention, under a permanent ID that resolves at https://howitspread.com/id/.

• Live version, every snapshot and checksums: https://howitspread.com/dataset
• How the score is computed: https://howitspread.com/method
• Tag definitions (versioned standard): https://howitspread.com/api/v1/standard
• New snapshot on the 1st of each month. Snapshots never change.

Cite

How It Spread (2026). How It Spread: the public record of viral events. Snapshot 2026-10-22. CC BY 4.0. https://howitspread.com/dataset

Files

• cases.csv: one row per case (1,309 rows, sha256 1c02599273c9046e5dae692274aa97bda0c124b9a7376c4cec95db4fa0502607)
• events.csv: one row per timeline event (19,732 rows, sha256 810626698a0db4ade1260367748489176cf4964278f1048f548ba9132c0dd008), joined to cases on case_id = id
• cases.json: every case with its timeline nested, plus the snapshot, score and taxonomy versions

cases.csv

Column	Meaning
id	Permanent case ID (HIS-00042). Never reused; survives renames.
slug	The case's current URL slug.
url	Permanent link to the case.
title	Case name.
owner	Brand, studio or person behind it, when there is one.
kind	What spread: campaign, product, film, series, meme, game and so on.
sector	Industry.
origin	How it started: organic, seeded, stunt, paid or mixed.
region	Country of origin (ISO 3166 alpha-2) or GLOBAL.
seed_date	Date of the first public post we could find.
peak_date	Date of peak attention.
origin_platform	Platform of the seed post.
platforms	Every platform on its timeline, semicolon-separated.
mechanics	Tagged mechanics, semicolon-separated (definitions in the standard).
score	Spread Score, 0 to 100.
band	Score band: Phenomenon, Breakout, Viral, Notable or Niche.
provisional	True when too few parts were measured to settle the score.
coverage	Share of the score's weight that was measured, 0 to 1.
reach	Reach part, 0 to 100.
contagion	Contagion part, 0 to 100.
breadth	Breadth part, 0 to 100.
velocity	Velocity part, 0 to 100.
longevity	Longevity part, 0 to 100.
events	Dated events on its timeline.
sources	Sources cited.
verification	How far it was checked, 0 to 4 (Researched, Deep, Fact-checked, Audited, Maker-confirmed).
verification_label	The verification level in words.
updated	Last change to the case.

events.csv

Column	Meaning
case_id	Permanent ID of the case it belongs to.
seq	Position on the case's timeline, from 1.
date	When it happened (ISO date).
precision	How exact the date is: day, week, month or year; month_end and year_end mean by the end of that month or year.
phase	Its role in the spread: precursor, seed, first amplifier, platform jump, press, peak, owner response, commercial, backlash or afterlife.
platform	Where it happened.
actor	Who did it: a handle, person, outlet or brand.
actor_kind	creator, celebrity, brand, press, owner or public.
actor_reach	The actor's followers or circulation at the time, when known.
country	Country (ISO 3166 alpha-2), when the event marks a new market.
text	What happened, in one sentence.
metric_value	A figure attached to the event, when there is one.
metric_label	What that figure counts.
url	The post or article itself, when public.

Read before you analyse

• Every case here spread. The record holds what went viral, not what failed, so it cannot estimate odds of success.
• verification says how far each case was checked (0 Researched, 1 Deep, 2 Fact-checked, 3 Audited, 4 Maker-confirmed). Researched cases were compiled by AI research agents from public sources. Filter on it when a claim matters.
• provisional scores rest on too few measured parts; coverage says how much was measured.
• Sources and the sourced-numbers ledger are on each case page, not in these files.

Licence

CC BY 4.0. Credit "How It Spread" and link https://howitspread.com/dataset.