Are newspapers betting on numbers of online participants that are unlikely to materialize? An analysis of popular sites built around user-generated content shows that news organizations may need to try new strategies – and form realistic expectations – about the number of visitors they can convince to become contributors and participants in a new, local online community.
In a survey, the most frequently cited examples of user-generated content, chosen by people who are enthusiastic about the future prospects for the genre, were Wikipedia and Digg. As of October 8, 2006, Wikipedia reports 1,473,418 articles in its English language edition alone 7, created by volunteers. An analysis of Wikipedia’s statistics shows the number of articles has doubled once every 345 days from October 2002 to October 2006.8
Digg doesn’t feature original content. Digg asks users – over 500,000 of them, say representatives of the company – to submit stories to be voted on, and then to vote stories up or down. The front page of the site reflects the relative popularity of submitted articles.
How Community Sites Succeed With Fewer Contributors Than You Might Think
Looking at the success of sites like Wikipedia and Digg, both of whom are among the top 20 most visited sites on the internet9, feature rapid growth of visitors and contributors -- and, notably, which have a very small number of people on payroll10 -- it’s easy to see why traditional media companies are excited: could this approach be the lifeboat they’ve been hoping for? Those traditional media companies are looking for ways to simultaneously grow and lower costs. Building an audience off of content created for free sounds like it fits the bill.
But will it work?
Aside from any considerations regarding quality or journalistic norms, whether or not a traditional media company can get the user-generated-content model to work for them isn’t a qualitative question, it’s a quantitative one.
Digg and Wikipedia require huge numbers of visitors in order to attract the tiny fraction of those visitors that are inclined to become contributors. Without sufficient contributors, Wikipedia and Digg wouldn’t be able to provide a site that featured consistently fresh information day after day with such a small staff.
In a talk by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales at Cornell University in June 2005, he cited a remarkable statistic. On a daily basis, 50% of edits to Wikipedia are performed by only .0072 of the users.11 He continued using these statistics in several subsequent presentations and interviews throughout 2006. Digg is also dependent on a small number of active, consistent users out of the much larger pool of visitors the site attracts. Digg is reported to have 500,000 visitors on a daily basis, but 50% of the front page is determined by an even smaller fragment of the site’s visitor pool than Wikipedia. Rand Fish, analyzing Digg’s own top user data, found that Digg’s top 100 users are responsible for 56% of the content on the front page:
“A logical extension shows that the top 100 Digg Users have contributed 14,249 stories to the homepage, or 56.41%. At Digg, a very select group of users is dominating the popular homepage content. Far from being a mass of opinion, Digg is instead showing, primarily, the content opinions of just a few, select folks.
There's certainly nothing wrong with this - it's not a secret or a problem and it isn't hurting Digg's popularity, reputation or importance. But, it is something that many folks who use the site don't realize and many marketers or folks attempting to use it to promote their content should be aware of.”
Rand Fish, “Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg's HomePage Content,” SEOmoz Blog, 7/20/200612
Let’s try and apply this concept in a local setting. New Haven is blessed to have the New Haven Independent, a high-quality local news weblog started by veteran journalist Paul Bass in 2005.
New Haven, Connecticut, has a population of 130,000. Let’s imagine for a moment that Bass had a spectacularly successful year and ended 2007 with an average of 13,000 visitors per day.
If Bass were as successful as Wikipedia in converting visitors to contributors, he’d have accumulated fewer than 100 consistent contributors; if he were as successful as Digg in reader to contributor conversion, he’d have even fewer. There are a number of lessons that news organizations can draw from this:
- Committed Contributors, Casual Contributors: Successful sites driven by user generated content have a core group of committed users who contribute consistently. Their efforts keep the site fresh, which in turn drives traffic and creates the flow of visitors that generates contributions from casual contributors. Casual contributors contribute infrequently, or even only once, but their contributions in the aggregate may make up a substantial percentage of the total contributions.
- Have appropriate expectations for community contributions. Expecting large numbers of contributors and a fast-growing number of new contributors may not be realistic.
- A little goes a long way. Sites like Wikipedia and Digg have made a significant impact with fewer committed contributors than many think. A community wrapped around a traditional newspaper may not need many committed contributors to make a significant impact on the paper and the community it serves.
Many have said that the reason so few site visitors become contributors to citizen journalism is because it’s unreasonable to expect more than a tiny fraction to be interested. We should be wary of this explanation; after all, in the modern history of computing we heard now-discredited predictions that only a tiny number of people would ever have computers or, later, ever use the Internet, or (still later) ever publish online.
Aaron Swartz, Wikipedian and cofounder of Reddit, a competitor of Digg’s, presented an alternative analysis to Wales’ regarding the relationship between committed and casual contributors on Wikipedia13. Counting volume of text – as opposed to edits – he came to the conclusion that casual users have a much larger impact on Wikipedia than the statistics presented by Wales implies. He writes: “This fact does have enormous policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit.” Swartz is, in our view, correct about the primacy of casual users in development considerations. Even while a small number of committed participants may have a central role in an online community’s stability and consistency, the features they want may be confusing or hostile to newer users.
It’s impossible to tell, from our early vantage point, if in fact there is pent-up demand that could be released by some not-yet-developed technology that would make such interactions so simple and pleasurable that rates of participation would rise dramatically. But to rule it out strikes us as a mistake.
