The New Producers

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.