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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
