TechnoCloud

Meaningful and detailed social networking statistics can prove elusive, certainly on the open net, so all the better to see a good summary of data from Facebook, MySpace and the lower profile Reunion on Jeremiah’s Web Strategy blog.

Perhaps the most interesting in the post is the Forrester prediction that Facebook will overtake MySpace in terms of registered users by end 2008. Feels about right until you look at the stats on display.

The stats claim 60m active users at present versus 110m for MySpace (but don’t state registered user numbers) - would it really double in a year given its high penetration in the key US market (85% of universities)? And yet, there’s the stat about active users doubling every six months, so it’s possible.

And what about MySpace’s likely growth, particularly when you consider one of the other statistics? Facebook’s average of 250k registrations a day versus MySpace’s 300k. Some catching up to do surely?

Brings to mind the old adage about the three types of lie: “lies, damn lies and (social networking) statistics”, as Jeremiah alludes to in a follow up post.

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Here’s a chart based on threads on LinkedIn and VentureBeat that shows the hottest startups of Silicon Valley.  The usual suspects are represented and a few besides.  Worth a look.

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Interesting post from Micropersuasion adding to the growing questioning of page views as a meaningful metric.

Given the growth in technologies, such as Ajax and even humble old Flash, which allow users to interact with page content without refreshing the page, the page view was already on questionnable ground - not that the industry could agree on how best to measure them in the first place…

Add to this the network effects of influencers that take an idea or brand and discuss it outside of the source site on their blog or social space and it challenges the traditional ad standard of ‘reach’ with an alternative measure ‘depth’ - although you should still look to measure the wider reach of a campaign from the wider network effects of ‘depth’.

I can see how the ‘depth’ argument works well for brands using online advertising and PR as ways to raise awareness, stimulate conversations and drive sales of their products.

It’s less clear for content publishers trying to monetise their content through advertising - how to charge and for what? Are unique users the metric, or are channel or site sponsorships the right model or are other models better suited to this space? Time will tell. It’s debatable how important page views were anyway in the wider world of stats and cost-per-click and cost-per-action advertising.

For content publishers non-intrusive ad-supported widgets may be a tool to monetise some of the depth and for wider network effects to be the PR that drives users back to the source content and widgets. 2007 is going to be an interesting year.

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A recent Nielsen Useit column seems to confirm that the ‘1% rule’ is alive and well. He states that:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

Although the percentages differ the numbers are echoed in a previous Guardian article that states the 1% rule arguing that:

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

The stats do of course vary depending on the nature of the community. Given the debatable copyright status of a large proportion of YouTube’s content, the numbers are more firmly skewed to those viewing rather than interacting and creating content. Whereas the video editing environment at the likes of Jumpcut and Motionbox has a higher percentage of users interacting and creating.

However, I predict that the 1% rule and its respective percentages will have to evolve as the nature of people’s level of interaction with online media evolves. With the increasing growth of multi-media personal publishing and interaction tools available the barriers to entry are rapidly reducing to creation and certainly interaction.

Challenges to the 1% rule

Take video editing community Jumpcut’s acquisition by Yahoo. As Yahoo begins to integrate Jumpcut’s software into their wider offering the prompts to remix and engage with media will increase in visibility and usage.

Likewise, Google announced in its deal with Warner Music Group that it was looking to facilitate user-generated content by allowing users access to Warner content ”for use in their creative user-generated productions”. That deal will be one of many.

As the social networking generation (which grows ever wider) continues to evolve, there is a whole body of users familiar with embedding and interacting with content and a growing body of tools for them to enable them to do so.

For businesses that monetise traffic, increased interaction with content equals increased traffic and increased new content which leads to more traffic - certainly firm commercial reasons to continue the trend.

Principles remain

Certain basic principles of the 1% rule will remain. There will remain a hard core of users that drive a community by investing considerable amounts of time in it. Equally there will remain a majority of lurkers surfing the community - time pressures, competing interests and familiarity with technology dictate that.

However, both the increasing ease of creating content and ease of interacting with it, mean that the 1% of creators and the 9-10% of interactors will grow putting the neat 1% rule in doubt.

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