TheWayoftheWeb

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mainstream media

Why is mainstream media still confused by the 80/20 rule?

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A recent study by Purewire revealed that only around 20% of Twitter users are contributing to the service, with 80% having fewer than 10 followers, and 37.1% having no tweets – leading Techcrunch to suppose most people on Twitter are sheep.

Meanwhile the New York Times reports the shocking discovery that bloggers who assume it’s an easy way to get a book deal or give up their day job often get disillusioned and give up. The article quotes the 2008 Technorati State of the Blogosphere, with 7.4 million (5%)  of the 133 million blogs tracked by Technorati having been updated once in the last 120 days.

The most active 2% of Wikipedia users made 73.4% of edits in 2006 (including maintenance and administrative edits).

The iPhone OS had 8% of the smartphone market, but generated 43% of mobile web requests and 65% of html usage.

Are we noticing a pattern here?

I suspect around 20% of the people reading this post will be knowingly thinking of Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 20% of the people of Italy owneed 80% of the land back in 1909, which was then generalised by Joseph M Juran in 1941 into the Pareto Principle, as the common rule of thumb that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, i.e. a Power Law with a The Long Tail.

Internet access gives everyone the ability to self-publish – it doesn’t mean everyone will. Or entitle everyone to be able to make a good living out of it.

And more importantly…

Even if just 1% of bloggers, people uploading video to Youtube, or podcasters achieve sustainable fame and income – how does that compare to the number of aspiring writers, film directors or radio DJs who never even got published or broadcasted under the old model?

The Long Tail never said everyone would get rich – you can either try to rise up to the hit end by being one of the small percentage working harder, being smarter, and getting luckier – or you can aggregate the long tail by working harder, being smarter, and getting luckier, just as Google did with Adsense.

As usability godfather Jakob Nielsen broke it down in 2006: “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.”

The internet doesn’t radically change that dynamic (although it’s definitely possible to move the figures slightly within a specific online community). What it does is hugely increases the numbers included in that 1%, and in that 9%, which has a bloody big impact on the 90%.

That’s the big lesson – a small number of people can get Wikipedia over 55 million U.S. visitors in a year, or create the fact that 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute (equivalent to Hollywood releasing 86,000 films every weekend!). It’s what got facebook to over 200 million users, and Twitter to over 32 million.

It doesn’t mean it’s all popular, or high quality.

It just means that most of mainstream media is likely to end up covered in content as if it went out in a desert sandstorm – and successful businesses need to figure out how to engage and build on that 1% or 20% which creates the value for everyone else.

Two throwaway thoughts on a Monday

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Both coming from recent updates on Twitter:

1. If we need proof that people are inherently social, how the hell did everyone find out about fire and the wheel before Mainstream Media? Or Social Networking, Social Media Marketing and Web 2.0 for that matter?

(brilliant response by both @epredator and @dalvado – seeing a wheel rolling past on fire!)

Wheel of Fire 5 by SanGatiche on Flickr (CC Licece)
Wheel of Fire 5 by SanGatiche on Flickr (CC Licece)

2. In a hyperconnected world of broadband and mobiles, will we see a premium on those things which allow us to break away and enjoy solitude – for example, with motorcycling, the supposed thrill of speed became a byproduct for me of experiencing solitude, extreme concentration, and getting close to experiencing ‘flow’.

That thought came from seeing @gapingvoid tweet that in a world of oversupply, ‘hope’ is pretty much the only thing people are willing to pay for.

Probably the worst article on Twitter in the world…

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Since the tragic events in Mumbai, there has been a lot of coverage of the role of Twitter in breaking news, with both advocates and critics referring to the speed of microblogging in providing updates but raising some questions about validity and honesty.

But to be fair, Mainstream Media (MSM) has been increasingly paying attention to Twitter over the last few months:

There are plenty more examples around, so it’s almost incredible that a mainstream UK publication can still create something quite so inept:

Is Twitter the new Facebook?

You can hear millions screaming in pain as they collectively answer ThisisLondon – ‘No, you buffoon’.

12 negative comments have already been posted, including mine. Sadly they edited out the link to www.140char.com, and others have had comments edited, with no public acknowledgement. Tech journalist Kate Bevan (@katebevan) has also been expressing her disapointment on Twitter, and having her comments edited. Also got negative comments from Amanda Rose (@amandita), who has researched Twitter extensively for academia (including interviewing yours truly!).

I’m not sure it’s worth the energy to deconstruct all the disasters yet again, so here’s my brief comments:

  • Badly researched, angled and written.
  • It’s 140 characters on Twitter, not 160.
  • Barack and Britney are manned by PR people, unlike real celebs ranging from Stephen Fry to Shaquille O’Neal.
  • The latest figures show about 5 million users per month.
  • The ‘brevity breeds banality’ issue has been debated, disproved and forgotten for months – brevity can lead to impact or banality depending on the person and content.
  • Twitter started becoming a news source with events like the UK, LA and Chinese earthquakes, and LA forest fires.
  • The ‘gimmick’ isn’t following people – the ‘gimmick’ is interacting with people via the reply functionality.

And there’s more. From the article:

‘after several false starts (“Error on page!”) I manage to log on to MoodyShell’s feed. “I hate it when I burn the roof of my mouth and then it starts to peel. Ew!” she says. Fascinating. Another click, and I am officially “following” her. It feels queasy and wrong.’

No wonder it feels wrong, when @nickcurtis hasn’t managed to follow anyone, and has only managed a solitary tweet. You’d also think if you’re posting something about Twitter, it might be worth popping back to check the response? Maybe it would make for a better article?

Maybe someone should point him to the appropriate Twitter search. Or just pointed him to all the similar articles from 18 months ago that were at least defensible by the fact that it was a new service with an initial familiarity hump to get other – everyone struggles with Twitter the first time they log in, and it’s only when they return and start following and using @replies it becomes an essential tool for research,interaction,news gathering, customer service and more.

Worth repeating?

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Writing about how the election coverage on Twitter and C-Span points to the future of media coverage, I came up with a little gem that I thought might be worth repeating:

‘aggregation of sources of information provides a starting point for a media company to add its own expertise and reason to provide something of value.‘

That’s it really. A mainstream media source can’t just aggregate content. Anyone can do that and the winners are decided by those who obtain a reasonable community and audience. And there’s already plenty of people out there, from Yahoo Buzz to Digg, to Mixx, to Sphinn, to microblogging.com.

But by aggregating and adding interpretation, it not only creates dynamic changing content, but actually opens up and highlights the expertise that a good journalist can bring on top of raw information. One of the mistakes we’ve continued to make in mainstream media is to underplay how good many journalists are at going beyond raw data, and the myraid ways in which they add value to it.

I’ve long believed it, but not managed to sum it up quite so succinctly before. And it’s not a new idea for plenty of notable people, e.g. Scott Karp, Jay Rosen, Pat Thornton (still no relation!), Howard Owens, Jeff Jarvis, David Cushman. And there are many, many more people I could name, and I’m sure that’s just a small proportion of a collective wisdom which suggests numbers and expertise big enough to hopefully break out of the social media echo chamber. And we can see it with the adoption in growing ways by a small number of titles (I mentioned the LA Times and The Guardian, here). Now we’re adding C-Span to the list.

The Twitter election and a glimpse of the future

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As an Englishman (albeit one with a degree in American Studies), I’ve followed the U.S presidential nominations with a fairly casual interest, and with a slight leaning towards one candidate, but not enough that I’m going to talk about it.

Instead, I’m going to proclaim this the ‘Twitter Election’, and the sign of how news and reporting is changing for the better. First up is Twitter’s own Election 2008. It’s fascinating to watch the opinions and messages appearing every second, although the fact that it seems to be based around the keywords of candidates names means I’m tempted to tweet about McCain oven chips and see if it appears!

What’s interesting is how public service broadcaster C-Span has integrated Twitter, Blog coverage, Video, a Debate timeline and a keyword list into the ‘Debate Hub‘. It’s a great example of how ‘aggregation of sources of information provides a starting point for a media company to add it’s own expertise and reason to provide something of value.‘ Sorry, thought that sentence was worth highlighting, although other people have been saying the same thing for a while.

I’ve talked in the past about Twitter providing a news mechanism that trumps mainstream media for events like earthquakes. And I’ve taken a look at what mainstream media needed to do to utilise the new tools available or become increasing irrelevant.

But events like the death of Heath Ledger, or the various earthquakes around the world had a much more striking effect for those that were on Twitter at the time than for the majority of non-microbloggers waking up hours later and being perfectly happy with the coverage they were broadcast – because they weren’t up at 2am to witness how radically different it could be.

This time, it’s an event which has been flagged up in advance, allowing the word to spread – and it’s increasingly being adopted by various mainstream media sources to a greater or lesser extent, allowing far more people to see the benefits of microblogging over traditional coverage.

And I predict we’ll see more and more of this in the coming months, even with controversies like the decision from an U.S. newspaper and website to Twitter live from a child’s funeral. Whether or not it was the correct way to treat that particular situation at the current time, it’s a sign that the boundaries are shifting, and going past simply acknowledging Twitter coverage. And for microblogging to hit the mainstream, the boundaries need to be a long way further down the road than the mass adopters.

I think it’s also the reason for Twitter moving towards grouping, as much as for users. It’s why I was interested in the previously posted quote by Ev Williams, saying that groups are coming. I don’t think it’s necessarily about just Twitter for enterprise as an inward facing tool. I think in Twitter’s case it will also be about groups and tools for outward facing use by companies, which is why they’ve been seemingly slow to respond to Yammer, Present.ly etc.

It’s about raising routes to monetise from enterprise, but also providing the tools to grow the userbase to drive significant revenue. Facebook does OK at 100 million active users per month – Twitter has about 2.5 million registered used. And that mainstream exposure could be the push it needs.

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