Downsides of Participation Inequality

von | Okt. 12, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing

Jakob Nielsen has some interesting views about the downsides of the 1% rule that I blogged about. In his article
Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities he lists those „Downsides of Participation Inequality“

The problem is that the overall system is not representative of Web users. On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from. This can cause trouble for several reasons:

  • Customer feedback. If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.
  • Reviews. Similarly, if you’re a consumer trying to find out which restaurant to patronize or what books to buy, online reviews represent only a tiny minority of the people who have experiences with those products and services.
  • Politics. If a party nominates a candidate supported by the „netroots,“ it will almost certainly lose because such candidates‘ positions will be too extreme to appeal to mainstream voters. Postings on political blogs come from less than 0.1% of voters, most of whom are hardcore leftists (for Democrats) or rightists (for Republicans).
  • Search. Search engine results pages (SERP) are mainly sorted based on how many other sites link to each destination. When 0.1% of users do most of the linking, we risk having search relevance get ever more out of whack with what’s useful for the remaining 99.9% of users. Search engines need to rely more on behavioral data gathered across samples that better represent users, which is why they are building Internet access services.
  • Signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion groups drown in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to identify the gems. Many users stop reading comments because they don’t have time to wade through the swamp of postings from people with little to say.

    • In addition, he also lists some point on „How to Overcome Participation Inequality“.
    But the main point still is: you can’t overcome participation inequality. You can only optimise the way content is produced an sorted, trying to make it more suitable and/or relevant for the average users.

    Analysis of the YouTube Acquisition by Google

    von | Okt. 10, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, SEO / SEA

    PVR Wire has a good analysis of the YouTube acquisition by Google.

    Google itself is already the 3rd busiest site on the internet, and now that it owns YouTube the company has control over a tremendous number of internet users, probably a higher percentage than anyone else!

    Here is an Alexa comparison of Google Video and YouTube:

    So Google has bought themselves a few eyeballs, since Google Video didn’t perform quite as well:

    Putting criticisms aside you need only look a the amount of users and growth of YouTube to see why Google bought them. 20 million regular users, the Top 10 site on the net, and 100 million video views a day.

    According to PVRWire there are three main things Google can do now with the new pool of content:

    • Video adverts in YouTube videos: selling adverts within or rather after the clips of users, preferrably context-sensitive.
    • Selling premium video, just like on google video.
    • Licensing content to TV stations like Blib.tv. Actually, a colleague of mine suggested to me today, that Google could start or at least support an extensive TV Network with channels broadcasting those thousands of clips clustered by topic, user votes, relevance, etc. per channel.

    Regardless of these benefits, there are two winners these days, and they may look like your average around-the-corner geek, but take care, they’re multi-millionairs now, with only about a year or two worth of work:

    The quality is a typical average user quality, with the little mishaps at the end – true user style, I like that. It has been viewed 560,859 times in the last two days, which makes it not top-video (yet), but I am confident they’ll make the top ten of their own site.

    Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary

    von | Okt. 1, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing

    Techcrunch has an interesting video online: Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary. (Ok, its almost 2 months old, but nevertheless very interesting.)

    The topics discussed include:

    1. What is Web 2.0?
    2. Are we in a bubble?
    3. What are the business models that will work on the web today?
    4. What is the role of publishers in a user generated world?
    5. How important and how big is the early adopter crowd?