Research of the internet "hype" life cycle and the possibilities of its monetization

The aim of this article is to develop a methodology for monetizing such a phenomenon in the modern digital environment as «hype». The analysis of scientific literature in the fields of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies and Media Studies made it possible to summarize the main research questions in the field of studying hype, as well as substantiate the characteristic features of hype in the digital environment and formulate the main research question: how can business use life cycle theory in order to monetize hype, quickly responding to the rapid growth in popularity of events or phenomena in the digital environment? Based on the empirical study period from 2016 to 2019 (expert survey in combination with the analysis of web analytics data from Yandex.Wordstat and Google.Trends web resources), the authors substantiated the economic and mathematical tools for making managerial decisions based on comparing the projected economic result from the implementation of the developed marketing activities based on hype events or phenomena , with the potential costs of their implementation. The empirical research allowed to confirm the authors’ hypothesis that the function of decreasing the popularity of hype requests can be effectively predicted based on the growth function, which made it possible to form a methodology for monetizing hype, based on predicting the potential return on the integration of marketing decisions based on thematic semantic constructions corresponding to the properties hype, in the early stages of its formation. The given methodology is universal and can be transformed to meet the needs of specific companies.