The blog of Cambrian House, a crowdsourcing / crowdfunding project, has a very interesting tidbit that I can’t refrain from reproducing.
The figures come from Bill Tancer of Hitwise, who “shared some hard numbers on how much participation is actually occurring at some of the most popular web 2.0 sites.”
* YouTube – 0.16% (visits to upload video)
* Flickr – 0.2% (visits to upload photos)
* Wikipedia – 4.59% (visits to edit pages)
Out of all the traffic YouTube and Flickr get, 0.2% of people actually upload videos or share photos. Wikipedia kind of surprised me with 4.59% of people editing pages.
The commentator then makes this important conclusion:
A very small percentage of your members are highly relevant. The 99.8% of casual observes in the community cannot overshadow the 0.2% providing content, or the magic will disappear.
This reminds me of an article I read lately. 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.
So I agree with Sami Viitamaki like he expresses himself at http://www.samiviitamaki.com/2007/04/27/on-social-media-and-participation/.
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Bas Reus said:
“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.”
These are exactly the activities that I call contributions in an Intellectual Contributions model where they are all recognized as valuable. The trick then is to make sure that no third party appropriates any of these contributions thus preventing others having access and that no one is denied a reward for their valuable participation if rewards are available.