April 24, 2007The New Producers |
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As I'll cover in my upcoming book, "Join the Conversation", consumers are proactive, professional and producers, however not all consumers are as active in terms of their participation.
Jakob Nielsen talks about the 90:9:1 rule, often referred to as the 1% rule which, put simply states that 1% of visitors or consumers will be responsible for the vast majority of content created. A good example is Wikipedia, where 1.8% of its users are responsible for over 72% of articles generated.
It's not that dissimilar to the 80:20 rule of loyalty and patronage, where typically a minority percentage of customers are responsible for a majority of revenue generated. B2B is a great example (versus the B2C CPG category by means of illustration)
Segue to a Reuters article titled, "Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak" with data points including:
- A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch
- ...only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos
- 4.6 percent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site.
I kind of wish the reporter had been aware of the 90:9:1 rule before penning the article, or perhaps the editor just chose to use an intentionally misleading headline to draw people into it.
The article then continues to reveal the real statistics that matter:
- ...visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668% in 2 years
- Visits by Web users to the category of participatory Web 2.0 sites account for 12% of U.S. Web activity, up from only 2% two years ago
- Web 2.0 photo-sharing sites now account for 56% of visits to all online photo sites
The important takeaway is not about "low user-involvement" but rather about a new wave of content "producers" that are anything on the continuum of replacing to complementing the existing media industry.
In addition, I would argue strongly that everyone visiting sites like Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube are participants and by no means passive like the traditional acts of watching television, listening to the radio or reading a magazine or newspaper article.
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Comments
Joseph
It is likely that participation follows a power-law distribution (more commonly known as a long-tail distribution). A few people do the lion's share of contributing, the lion's share of people do practically no contributing.
Charlene Li over at Forrester has just released a report that looks at participation on-line in more detail. She blogged about it at the Groundswell blog.
http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/04/forresters_new_.html
And Ross Mayfield blogged about the power-law of particpation at his blog about a year ago.
http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/power_law_of_pa.html
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager
Posted by: GrahamHill
Great point. The fact that only a small percentage of people are creating doesn't mean that participation isn't growing immensely.
It's important to remember that people visiting Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. are choosing to do so on their own. They are ACTIVELY seeking out these sites and fulfilling their own curiosity. Therefore, they are significant participants as well.
Another key point is that "regular people" want to see what other "regular people" are producing. They don't care as much about what professional/commercial producers create. Instead, they are obsessed with discovering what their fellow citizens can accomplish. It's this devoted interest in the work of other humans just like us that makes the act of participation so meaningful and worthwhile.
Posted by: Ryan Karpeles
Good to see some counterarguments to the Reuters article. I'm writing my thesis on social media and crowdsourcing and I must say I have a more positive view on where participation on the web is heading.
As regards the Reuters study I would like to point out that it talks about 'visits' as opposed to 'users'. For example, if there was only a hundred people in the world and every one of them visited YouTube a hundred times, all uploading a video during one of their visits, that would mean that 1% of the visits were 'creative' visits. However, 100% of the people on earth would be creators, having uploaded that one video!
Posted by: Sami Viitamäki
Of course I meant Hitwise study...
Posted by: Sami Viitamäki
