Hitwise’s findings in its study on participation (as reported by Reuters here) has stirred discussion on whether or not the new media is that participative after all. For those that haven’t heard about this, Hitwise found that only 0.16% of visits to web 2.0 site Flickr were to upload photos. “Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak”, Reuters rather bleakly titled their article. Of course, those vetted in community business know about the 1-90-90 rule, according to which the active creators usually don’t count for more than that one percent in a community, as Joseph Jaffe already noted. I would like to point out another clear sign of bad journalism with the Reuters article. By reading it, without knowing more about communities, you get the idea that original content creation is the only way to participate in social media. This, of course, could not be further from the truth, as there are number of ways to participate by other, lower-level means: remixing, mashing up data, commenting on others’ original content, blogging about it, rating, voting, recommending, organizing content (tagging), etc. PEW American Life, for example has found that 28% of web users have tagged content online. This is quite far from the 0.16%, and I think tagging definitely counts as participation.
Furthermore, as regards the units of measure in the Hitwise study I would like to point out that it has tracked ‘visits’ instead of ‘users’. This does a disservice to understanding what percentage of the users actually produce original content. For example, consider that there’s only a hundred people in the world. Every one of them visits YouTube a hundred times, all uploading a video during one of their visits, and checking out others’ videos during their other 99 visits. That would mean that 1% of the visits were ‘creative’ visits, and so a study tracking visits would conclude that 1% of the population is particpating by creating new content. However, all 100% of the people on earth would actually be original content creators, having uploaded that one video! Does this matter with the size and scope of the study at hand? I don’t know, but if you do, please, share your thoughts.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Hannes Treichl // Apr 28, 2007 at 6:57 pm
dear sami,
excellent post (as usual)! i would not only consider tagging as participation but even watching the videos and other user generated you mention above. why? because people not only talk on the web but also in real life.
i am quite sure that a lot more people have talked about the chevy tahoe videos or the rats at KFC which were uploaded by a small number of users. and talking is even more effective than tagging, because it converts experiences into sticky notes in people’s brains.
later these memories will turn into decisive arguments at the point of sale, influencing buying decisions. therefore: who cares about the 1% participation rule? (ok, investors and advertisers might.) if 1% of a community is strong enough to influence buying decisions, it is absolutely irrelevant if 1% or 10% are providing content.
good luck for your thesis from austria,
hannes
2 sami.viitamaki // May 2, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Thanks for the comment, Hannes
I’ve thinking about the issue as well. For example, on YouTube, when you choose to view a video, that has been viewed a million times over one that has been viewed a thousand times, doesn’t that make you a participator in the process, having made an active selection in contrast to just passively consuming everything that happens to be on the front page and leaving other videos out?
Furthermore, that one viewing adds to the view count and makes it more attractive/unattractive for others to view. Even in the era of the long tail, people are far from completely individualistic beings. they still feel the need to consume the same things other people are consuming (or intentionally different things, should they want to separate themselves from the masses) in order to reinforce the feeling that they have made the ‘correct’ selections. The choices others have made matter in both cases.
I nevertheless find talking about the videos, ads, etc. in real life problematic when assessing participation rate in social media. This is because people do talk about conventional TV and print ads too, and have done so since those media have existed. I still don’t count TV viewers from the sixties having participated in social media… Maybe I should?
3 Hannes Treichl // May 6, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Sami,
I fully agree to your point of view, nice examples again. Some words to add:
Yes, you are right again when argueing if it makes sense to add TV viewers from the Sixties. However, how about those videos, ads and other user generated content things that so far never made it to conventional TV or other media?
Only active participation (as you perfectly describe it in chapter 1 2 of your comments), makes them visible to the world and feeds them with the power to be considered as “worth talking about” resp. as “worth to be shown” on TV. Or think about those tiny companies who did not afford spots or ads in the past but today can create gorgeous word of mouth campaigns through social media…
Different to the Sixties, social media can close gaps between “I want to influence” and “I am able to influence”. Gaps that did exist at that time and which might have prevented flames from becoming a fire in the past.
My proposal: Real life talks are to be considered as participation when being a result of the new possibilites created by social media.
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