Time Magazine (via Smart Mobs) has published a dubious article questioning participation in Web 2.0. Entitled “Who’s Really Participating in Web 2.0“, the piece examines how many of us are the “writers” on the read/write web. The author ultimately waffles on a meaningful conclusion, though he hints that Web 2.0 is far from fulfilling its potential. Of course I agree with that, but I really don’t like the statistics the author has used to demonstrate his point.
According to Hitwise, only 0.2% of visits to YouTube are users uploading a video, 0.05% visits to Google Video include uploaded videos and 0.16% of Flickr visits are people posting photos. Only the social encyclopedia Wikipedia shows a significant amount of participation, with 4.56% of visits to the site resulting in content editing.
Not only is the percentage of participation very small online, there are some very strong skews as to who is participating. Visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 men and women, yet edits to Wikipedia entries are 60% male. The gender gap is even greater for YouTube, a site whose visitors are equally male and female, but whose uploaders are over 76% male.
The fundamental problem with the analysis is that sites like Youtube, Flickr and Google Video (and by proxy, Web 2.0) are set up as if there is supposed to be a meaningful upload/download ratio by visit. Video and images are inherently built to be consumed; with the viral nature of Youtube or Flickr, we’re have to be constantly uploading to ever get anywhere near the 80/20 rule the writer cites. In a recent survey I did, I found that over 2 Million videos were uploaded to YouTube each month. That’s a huge amount – but compared to the number of visits Youtube gets by bored office workers and procrastinating graduate students? No way that ratio is ever going to be 80/20, nor should it. The uploading of a video and the viewing of a video are not equivalent actions in any way, and not a reasonable predictor of “participation.”
Instead, the author should have looked at the recent Pew Survey on teen internet behavior. In the national survey, the authors Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart found that 47% of teens have uploaded photos online (with gender split at 54%F/40%M, nothing like that 25%F/75%M Hitwise found). In addition, the Pew survey found that 14% of all online teens had uploaded videos, and 22% of teens who use social networking as video posters. This is much more meaningful and representative than the upload/no-upload dichotomy Hitwise utilizes.
Tags: media, statistics, Web 2.0
I’m reading an advance copy of a book entitled The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen.
He posits that there is so much amateur content on the web that it will overrun the people with actual training and talent, and endanger many professional journalists, artists, musicians, etc.
It’s interesting to see either set of the statistics, either from Pew or from Time in terms of the premise of Keen’s book.