I’m behind as usual – I just read Bradley Horowitz’s article on ‘creators, synthesizers, and consumers‘ which was written days ago. It’s got a nice little pyramid up at the top which shows how Yahoo thinks of social media and community – for every one creator there’s ten synthesizers and one hundred consumers.
The majority of commenters seemed to love Horowitz’s post. I think it’s a good reason to short Yahoo – that pyramid’s a .44 caliber shot in the foot. Once you start believing 90% of your audience is passive you can’t help but shape your existing communities and design new ones with the passive consumers in mind. Talk all you want about making it easy to create – if you expect the bulk of your users to be passive gawkers your thinking’s never going to stray from CPM ad space. How disappointing – since it is possible to design a service that demands creation, and such services are far stickier than ones built around showing ads to passive surfers. To compete, Yahoo’s new services need 90% creators, not 1% or 10%.
I’d call the ‘creator-community’ the primary lesson of Web 2.0, but in fact creation-demanding services have been around for ages. Think about e-mail. Think about instant messaging. These huge applications are just frameworks for delivering user-created content to other users. While it’s possible to just passively receive e-mails or instant messages the vast bulk of people add their own content to the system, which in turn acts as an incentive for others to participate. A virtuous circle sucks everyone in, and e-mail and IM are now near-universal. I expect BitTorrent – which forces the user to upload as they download – is on a similar trajectory.
As a counterexample – think about the feed reader. Another framework for delivering user-created content to other users. However, the feed reader hasn’t yet found an application that demands participation and creation. For every creator of an RSS feed I imagine there are a hundred passive consumers; the community of feed reader users looks a lot like Horowitz’s pyramid. And that’s why RSS feeds have minimal impact compared to e-mail and IM. That’s why RSS isn’t ‘mainstream’. Until an application is invented that makes publishing a useful feed a natural and painless consequence of reading one, it’ll never reach ubiquity. (An aside – ‘edge feeders‘ do indeed exist in a very early stage of development. Am watching them closely.)
It’s telling that the social media Yahoo’s bought doesn’t fit Horowitz’s own pyramid – del.icio.us and Flickr don’t demand that participants create, but they’re designed to encourage creation at rates far higher than one in one hundred or even one in ten. There’s no huge body of del.icio.us users out there that browse around the service but don’t have accounts – if you ‘get’ del.icio.us you’ll create an account and add bookmarks. Flickr browsers are also disproportionately Flickr account holders and Flickr community contributors, compared to the users of bigger services – otherwise, what’s the point? Photos can be and are shared via e-mail and can be and are found through simple image search. It’s becoming obvious to me that Yahoo hasn’t changed del.icio.us and Flickr much since their acquisition because they just don’t understand them.
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Great post. Of course, buying Flickr and del.icio.us essentially froze them both in ice. Neither can be touched for fear of alienating the geek crowd, and without integrating them into other services they miss out on the additional network effect. The best that Yahoo can do is copy ideas from Flickr over to Yahoo Photos, which is exacltly what they are doing right now.
Ask Frumin about Reblog next time he’s in the office. =)
Reading is easier than writing. I’m sure most of Yahoo’s readers are passive, and will continue to be. Yahoo will most likely integrate del.icio.us features into its main search so that passive users can access the work of the active contributors.
Mark,
“I’m sure most of Yahoo’s readers are passive, and will continue to be.”
I think Greg’s point is the exact opposite of this – users cease to be passive as soon as you give them the tools of creation. Instead of assuming that 90% of your users are passive, assume that 100% are potential content creators, then build the tools that enable that to happen.
Good points.
I consider del.icio.us and Flickr to be 30-40-something creator-communities. In this sense, Yahoo! was buying into the future. Whose future? The 13-25 demographic creator-communities which use MySpace and, as you point out, IM and SMS, to create and maintain community activity.
Just as my generation (30-something) grew up playing Space Invaders, Centipede, and Galaga, when I reached a certain age, I got hooked on Quake, Doom, Half-Life and Grand Theft Auto.
The real question is, what will be the GTA equivalent of MySpace in 5-10 years? I seriously doubt it will look anything like del.icio.us or even Flickr. But I’m sure Yahoo! can learn something from them. You have to respect their taste at the very least.
Excellent points.
It’s stuff like this that honestly makes me wonder how much Yahoo “gets” what they’re trying to become. I think they’re right to focus on social media and leverage network effects as a way to differentiate themselves from Google, but as you demonstrate, its not clear they understand anything about it.
Del.ico.us and Flickr are participatory media: their value to users increases the more a user participates. Same for sites like MySpace and to a lesser extent blogging.
If they hope to leverage the social web, Yahoo needs to lose this idea that there’s only a small percentage of users who are content creators and the rest is a passive audiences. A hierarchial pyramid might have applied to the old media of television, radio, and movies, but its completely wrong for the new media based on social networks. It should look like a spider web, not a pyramid.
Delicious allows users to generate content the same way Amazon allows users to generate content by selling them stuff. It’s transactional – users performing a selfish act with little regard to the content generation piece of it.
In fact, I would consider the type of content generated by Delcious to be closer to simple clickstream than it is to a pure user generated content play like Epinions.
Don’t get me wrong, sites that are able to make content generation a selfish act are in a wonderful, enviable position.
But the vast majority of user generated content sites don’t have this. If you look at any forum, user review site, wiki – and I’d even guess social networking sites like Myspace and YouTube – the usage patterns will follow what Bradley describes.
Tons of people browsing, and a small minority contributing. And just because something matches this pattern doesn’t mean it’s a dog – most people would say that user generated reviews match this patter exactly, yet should be considered “mainstream.”
So just because a site or two exist in which this pyramid doesn’t hold true, doesn’t mean Yahoo’s shooting themselves in the foot.
And if you design sites that hinge on 100% participation, the odds say that you will be spectacularly disappointed.
Thanks for the feedback.
To be clear, “The Pyramid” isn’t Yahoo’s strategy. “The Pyramid” is an empirical observation.
Insight into our strategy in fact is better gleaned from this remark: “I’m a huge believer in removing obstacles and barriers to entry that preclude participation.” The comments regarding “implicit creation” are intended to illustrate one method we’re using to tear down this pyramid and move to a model where the distinction between these levels is moot.
When I give presentations the pyramid actually dissolves into a concentric circles where the three categories are actually 99% overlapping and indistinguishable.
We may in fact be in “violent agreement.”
Regarding “It’s becoming obvious to me that Yahoo hasn’t changed del.icio.us and Flickr much since their acquisition because they just don’t understand them.” The truth is that Flickr and del.icio.us haven’t changed themselves much since their acquisition because they are not broken.
I loved the post. Great summary. Wrote on my blog that I think this is a great indicator of why and which video communities are working
Good points Greg. I almost feel like writing a post about it now. Here are the two caveats which mediate your position and Yahoo’s:
1. While it may be true that it’s not good to assume that 90% of your *users* will be passive, it’s much more true recognize that 90% of the *time* your users (active or passive) will be using your site, it is likely to be in a passive manner. This *is* true for email, and even MySpace. You’re generally consuming at least 10x what you’re creating. Usually much more. Think about how this manifests in blogs. I consider myself an extremely active commenter around the web, and yet, I comment on maybe 1 out of every 100 or so blog entries I read (including this one!). Anyway, the realization that 90% of *activities* and not necessarily *people* may be pretty passive in nature helps you craft an experience that is high-involvement when you want it to be and low-involvement when you don’t.
2. The examples of whether Yahoo is right or you are right depend largely on what sort of service you’re talking about. Mainstream news consumption? Probably a lot more passive than you think. Social bookmarking? Probably a lot more active than Yahoo thinks. I think as long as allowances are made for the vast differences in the nature of these services though, your general point of “dont assume passivity” is a very helpful one.