The three C's (or the 1, 19, and 80%) of social media (one more time)

Robert Young has a nice piece over at GigaOM about the "fat belly" portion of the long tail. It's an idea I've been talking about for the past couple of months and I figured I would chime in here.

I break user up into the "three c's" (old school!):

creatives (1%)
contributors (19%)
consumers (80%)

In the Netscape/reddit/digg world:

a) The creatives are the ones who put in stories.
b) The contributors are the ones who add comments and vote.
c) The consumers are the ones who just ride on the work of the first two groups.

In order to get the consumers (the 80%) you need the creatives and contributors (the 1% and 19%).

In order to get the contributors (the 19%) you need the creatives (the 1%).

In order to get the 1% you need to motivate them somehow.

At Netscape we motivated them with compensation, recognition, and affiliation.
At digg they motivated them with recognition and affiliation.

Netscape is building the 19% right now, and in many ways we are an anomaly since we started with a large amount of traffic due to Netscape's heritage. We brought in the 1% and they are doing an amazing job. We've got the 80% covered, and we right now we've been building up--and frankly educating--that 19% on what social news even is.

People in the web 2.0 bubble forget exactly how niche what we do is. The mass audience doesn't understand what social news and bookmarking is. It's gonna take another 2-3 years for them to figure it out. Just like it took 3-4 years for blogging to stick. However, I've seen this story before and it comes to resolution quickly.

Of the 19% we need to educate (and I say educated not get, since we have the users already), I'd say we already have 1/3rd up to speed. By the end of the year we'll have explained this concept to the other 2/3rds. You can't build a community overnight, it takes time. I have to say however, that I'm thrilled we got to 50,000+ registered members in < 2 months. We're adding well over 1,000 a day and growing--we're way ahead of our plan. As you can see looking at Netscape many stories are getting dozens to hundreds of comments, but not that many votes. It turns out normal folks are more interested in talking than voting--we've got to actually remind people to vote and explain to them how to find the "on deck" stories in the tracker.

Sep 5th 2006 8:52AM
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1. Since you seem to be quite interested in the impact of top users I thought you might find this link of interest: http://www.dabbledb.com/explore/screencasts/digg/ . It is a screencast of the guys at dabbledb taking a couple rss feeds from digg and creating a quick analyzer to figure out the percentage of front page stories posted by the top 30 users. They use a very small sample but it would be pretty easy to use a larger sample if you wanted to show off some numbers. I should mention I have cashed a consulting cheque or two from dabbledb but I certainly wouldn't consider myself an employee. Perhaps a bit of a fan.

Posted at 2:09AM on Sep 6th 2006 by Steven Noble

2. The need to stay calibrated with the non-Web 2.0 world on subjects like social news and bookmarking is a good point. We get the hive mindset and forget the rest of the world is far behind our adoption/education rates on Web 2.0 fundamentals. I find this especially true when listening to the Gillmor Gang, which I love, because it's aimed at such an extreme niche. I understand most of it but that?s only because I eat, sleep, and dream about this stuff. As you've joked on the show, there's probably an audience of very few who listen but those few sure do like it-- and that's what's important, not the mass audience.

What can the blogosphere and us Web 2.0 fans do to speed up adoption since I assume the rising tides of increased social news & bookmarking understanding should raise all ships (netscape and digg and reddit, NYT and WaPo, etc.). And if it's really still going to take 2-3 years, how can that information arbitrage be continually leveraged for competitive advantage? Thanks.

Posted at 2:44AM on Sep 6th 2006 by chris h.

3. I agree with pagey. But then, I tend to agree with Rich Florida's assertions made in "Rise of the Creative Class," so I feel the pool is larger.

Then again, you are right about the bubble. I'm shocked at the number of people I encounter who have never heard of Engadget. And these are people who would really get a kick out of it...

Posted at 9:09PM on Sep 6th 2006 by Victor Agreda Jr

4. These percentages also fit the Web 2.0 world of Wiki's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki]. For Wikis to work, a very small number of creative users (enthusiasts in Wiki speak) is all that is needed to put up the vast majority of content on the website. A significantly larger number of contributors can then join in by commenting and discussing the content while the vast majority of the community then sits back and simply consumes what they find interesting or important.

This process depends of course on first getting the creative folks on board. The topics, articles, blogs, links, and other content the enthusiasts post on the Wiki is the engine that encourages the eventual involvement of the contributors whose diversity and greater numbers create the "fat belly" of a truly successful Wiki. That is, a Wiki whose dynamic content and emergent properties naturally draw the attention of the large percentage of folks in the community who choose to partake only through the consumption of the Wiki's rich content.

Posted at 2:54AM on Sep 7th 2006 by Richard Currie Smith

5. creatives (1%) seems low to me. Without people submitting stories, there would be no stories to vote or comment on. Or the stories would be of poor quality that people would not want to vote or comment on them. I think it starts at the creatives level without that the rest would not exist.

Posted at 9:12PM on Sep 8th 2006 by pagey

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