Viddling Around™

Today’s Guardian talks about a popular meme about user generated content making the rounds, that;

• 1% of your audience actually creates content
• 10% of your audience will add some value by entering comments, tagging or rating,
• 89% of your audience will simply just consome or view the content

Blows the old 80/20 rule right out of the water. The Guardian’s article validates this with some interesting stats relative to YouTube, WikiPedia, and Yahoo!. This meme, if true also probably reflects web behavior in general: does this scale to the entire internet population in at large (90% of the internet audience will read the blogs/sites/content created by the 1%)?

One argument I pose though is the Guardian’s YouTube reference; what portion of that 89% actively share those videos by emailing the link to a friend. I would state that the act of sharing is a form of contribution and adds value to YouTube, by expanding the audience. Yes, the economics of serving an ever expanding audience have to work - but in terms of marketing the YouTube brand, this works.

Of course the broader questions are, what are the real world impacts of this on business model, customer service, expense management, et cetera, et cetera. In your own case, should you find ways to give more love to your 1%-ers, and reward them for contributing? Do you ‘penalize’ the 89% with various attempts to monetize them, i.e. advertising?

Better still - does the ‘crap’ rule (80/20?) apply on top of this 1% rule? If only 1% actually create the content, and of that content created, 80% of it is of little to no value (stupid videos that nobody watches, stories nobody Diggs, etc.), then that would mean that only .2% of your online audience is creating the content that drives your traffic.

Last question, and back to my favorite topic of Net Neutrality — even if you were to believe that the Broadband Providers needed the capital for improvements & expansion (and if you do, I’ve got this bridge…), wouldn’t it make more financial sense to look for ways to maybe extract a little more value from 90% of the audience, vs. squeezing the 1% who attract them in the first place?