Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

Only 0.6% Of Users Make Content for YouTube

This seemingly low figure compares to 0.2% who make content for flickr and 4.59% of visitors who make content for Wikipedia. The statistic is the percentage of overall users of the site who contribute content. The article in the Guardian’s Siteseeing, by Heather Hopkins of Hitwise noted, “Visits to Web 2.0 sites have grown sevenfold in the past year….They need community participation to generate the content that keeps people coming – but active participation in terms of making content remains low. The 1% rule (1% make content, 10% add, 89% just view) overstates it.”

From Plugin cinema from The Guardian, via Tomas Fluffy Logic.

How very very very interesting indeed. Exceptionally interesting if you ask me.

I had thought that the participation ratios of the success stories of web2.0 would be much higher because they are fun things.

I had assumed that web metrics, and the information systems and business models related to them had moved from the blunt views/uses/pages along a bit toward participation ratios because the ‘UGC’ movement had raised the game to something more akin to the work done on Communities of Practice by people like Miguel Cornejo Castro (whose CoP measurements paper I continue to recommend to anyone thinking about this stuff) had made it all a bit more exciting.

Am I the only one who might have thought that flickr/youtube etc. might have had stronger participation ratios? I wonder. Also I wonder if it’s just my expectation that the ratios would be higher, or the result of the zeitgeisty distributed marketing wave of the www2 movement. Hmm. This has probably been discussed to death way back in April when it came out, and I’m well behind, but there you go. It’s exceptionally interesting stats if you ask me. It tells me that blunt page views still dictate the viability of a social network and that participation figures remain in the closet a bit.

I hear things from organisation people like ‘you know, we want figures and engagement like youtube and it’s amazing success’. I respect this and spend some time trying to explain to them that professional networks won’t show this because, by their very professional nature, they aren’t fun places and won’t show participation ratios akin to places where people are having fun. Then we get on with it and do our best to get some knowledge moving.

After 6 months to a year, the participation ratio starts to improve, and then they are moving. Then they have to explain to their internal work-mates why it’s not like youtube etc. etc. (building networks/communities is a tough and long and deeply human activity).

But actually, if youtube et al are not busting new grounds in participation ratios, and are still being heralded as ‘the dope’, then the organisations are doing much much better than perhaps they had set themselves up for, and can also focus on page views. Perhaps.

Now what was I doing? Oh yes; collecting June’s stats for CILIP’s member communities and working on the ‘evaluation’ chapter of the ‘end of Ed’ report with the web and knowledge crew. How serendipitous that this should appear at this time.