Add to ORKGDiffusion of innovation can be interpreted as a social spreading phenomena governed by the impact of media and social interactions. Although these mechanisms have been identified by quantitative theories, their role and relative importance are not entirely understood, since empirical verification has so far been hindered by the lack of appropriate data. Here we analyse a dataset recording the spreading dynamics of the world’s largest Voice over Internet Protocol service to empirically support the assumptions behind models of social contagion. We show that the probability of spontaneous service adoption is constant, the probability of adoption via social influence is linearly proportional to the fraction of adopting neighbours, and the proba...