
Study finds weak participation on Web 2.0 sites - gibsonf1
http://news.com.com/Study+finds+weak+participation+on+Web+2.0+sites/2100-1032_3-6177059.html?tag=nefd.top
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pg
Odd spin to the title. The ratios they quote sound about what I'd predict.
What standard are they weak in comparison to? Presumably whatever uneducated
guess the writer of this article already had in his head. This kind of thing
is exactly why traditional journalism sucks.

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Goladus
However low it might be, as a ratio, isn't something I'd really be too
concerned with. The ratio of Steven Spielberg to everyone who sees his movies
is pretty low, for example. I don't think that's a problem.

Only 0.2% of users upload photos to flikr, probably because the number of
lurkers has skyrocketed. The number of quality contributors only needs to grow
fast enough to keep the lurkers and voters growing.

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timg
No kidding. As much as some people around here hate to hear it, sometimes you
have to FORCE your users _provide_ content before they can _receive_ their
fill of content from your app. What are the benefits/costs of each approach?

Allowing users to receive without giving content:

1\. Good: Maximizes the impact of your PR/ Lets you grow really fast over a
short period of time.

2\. Bad: Easy come, easy go. Since the users have no role as a content
creator, they will be out of there the second your competitor has the
slightest feature improvements over you.

Requiring every user to be a creator (edit- to receive full benefit from your
app):

1\. Bad: The start can be rough. Expect to have to really have to use some
marketing ingenuity.

2\. Good: Users will be locked in.

3\. Good: Your site will (should) be far more valuable if more people are
contributing. This, along with #1 will lead to exponential growth.

4\. Maybe bad: With this abundance of content, it will be mandatory that you
find a way to present the user with the content that is most relevant to him.

5\. Good: You are monopolizing access to a lot of content. You can probably
charge users directly for this access.

Thoughts?

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Goladus
Another bad of requiring everyone to be a creator, which depends on the sort
of site you are making:

-Not everyone wants to or has the skills to be a creator.

I'm not a photographer. My pictures are barely good enough for myspace photo
albums. No amount of coercion is going to get me to take and upload photos to
flikr. It's only going to make me not use the site at all.

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timg
But in your example, the absence of photo albums on myspace is punished quite
heavily in practice.

Right up until they were sitting on a billion dollar valuation, you could not
even make your photos private to just your friends. Sharing was mandatory.

Note that I am not saying that zero content should be available until the user
has made a contribution to the site, just that the site should at least keep
something special for people who do. Most importantly, I am not saying that
this practice is best for all sites or even the majority.

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Goladus
"Note that I am not saying that zero content should be available until the
user has made a contribution to the site, just that the site should at least
keep something special for people who do. Most importantly, I am not saying
that this practice is best for all sites or even the majority."

I agree. On myspace, for example, much of the value is tied up in the actual
user. Quality photos aren't important. What's important is that they are
photos of a real person you can make comments on and send messages to. It
makes sense for them to encourage participation to a greater degree.

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nickb
"Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular
photo-editing site owned by Yahoo, are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study
found."

Wow! That surprised me. This is very, very low. For a while, blogs were
quoting various stats saying that 1% of users are creators, 10% are
participators/aggregators (people who vote, comment etc) and rest are lurkers.
New numbers are really unnerving since I have so much energy currently
invested in a social/participant site. I think it's time to seriously start
planning for a plan B.. "what if" situations.

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nostrademons
Take a careful look at the number they're measuring. They say that only 0.2%
of _visits_ to Flickr are uploads.

That's very different from saying that only 0.2% of _users_ upload content.
Even someone who regularly uploads photos to Flickr probably views 10 photos
for every one they upload. Think about news.YC: in a typical day, I probably
post 3-4 comments and submit one article, yet I read about two dozen articles
and 50+ comments. And I'm #13 on the leader list, so most people would
probably consider me a participant.

IMHO, the article chose a very meaningless number and then reported it as a
big find. Reads _always_ outnumber writes, by a large margin. Your top
contributors don't just post things, they're also usually voracious consumers,
probably reading dozens of items for every one they submit.

It's like saying that novelists read 100 books for every one that they write,
and therefore they aren't really contributing anything to literature.

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zaidf
What is more important is where the trend is going rather than where it is
right now.

From personal experience, I'd say this has good chance of not being accurate.
Almost everyone I've run into has uploaded or thought of uploading a video or
picture to YouTube or Flickr or Facebook.

\--Zaid

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npk
My personal experience is the contrary. In fact, I found this article eye-
opening, which is funny, because the result seems so obvious.

It seems most people who join social networking sites are essentially voyeurs,
and this has consequences for the kind of business I'd like to start.

What is the trend? I bet it's pretty constant, or slowly increasing. -But I
have no data to back any of my statements up :)-

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jamiequint
This was one of the main points of Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell in "Citizen
Marketers" where they talk introduced what they called "The 1 Percenters",
named for the average contribution rate of the sites they studied.

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Tichy
Even if users are not uploading movie clips, they are still providing content
by adding comments and ratings and social network nodes (for whatever
purpose). So I think the study doesn't really understand Web 2.0).

