Most consumers are simultaneously neophilia, curious to discover new things, and deeply neophobic, afraid of anything that is too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.

— Derek Thompson

People gravitate toward products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable--MAYA.

— Derek Thompson

People have all day to talk about what makes them ordinary. It turns out that they want to share what makes them weird.

— Derek Thompson

Posting dramatic charts or funny pictures is good and giving people smart reasons to believe what they already think is great.

— Derek Thompson

Quality, it seems, is a necessary, but insufficient attribute for success.

— Derek Thompson

Some consumers buy products not because they are ‘better” in any way, but simply because they are popular. What they’re buying is not just a product, but also a piece of popularity itself.

— Derek Thompson

The line from psychologists is, if you’ve seen it before, it hasn’t killed you yet.

— Derek Thompson

The mere observation that something is popular, or even that it became so rapidly, is not sufficient to establish that it spread in a manner that resembles a virus. Popularity on the internet is driven by the size of the largest broadcast. Digital blockbusters are not about a million one-to-one moments as much as they are about a few one-to-one-million moments.

— Derek Thompson

The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.

— Derek Thompson

This long-tail distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.

— Derek Thompson