From FT.com | Tech Blog | techfile 9.04.09.
Facebook registered its 200 millionth active user, continuing its stunning growth. Just in January the site claimed it had 150m users. That amounts to an additional 50m users in the past three months, or about 500,000 new users per day. Much of this new growth is coming internationally, however, where internet traffic is harder to monetise.
Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman have done a fascinating study which seems to undermine the theory that in order to succeed in the YouTube ecosystem you need to be a prolific and persistent uploader.
The Abstract of their paper reads:
A hallmark of the attention economy is the competition for the attention of others. Thus people persistently upload content to social media sites, hoping for the highly unlikely outcome of topping the charts and reaching a wide audience. And yet, an analysis of the production histories and success dynamics of 10 million videos from \texttt{YouTube} revealed that the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold. This paradoxical result is further compounded by the fact that the average quality of submissions does increase with the number of uploads, with the likelihood of success less than that of playing a lottery.
The researchers (who work at HP Labs in Palo Alto), studied the hit rates of 10 million videos uploaded by 600,000 users before 30 April 2008 and classified as a ‘success’ any video that came among the top 1% of those viewed.
Their finding is that “the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold.” Why? “When a producer submits several videos over time, their novelty and hence their appeal to a wide audience tends to decrease.”
So why do people persist in the face of declining audience figures? Wu and Huberman argue that they are like gamblers, who tend to overestimate the chance of winning when the probabilities are small. (Note: professional gamblers don’t operate like that.)
I think this misinterprets the biggest driving force behind user-generated content: the fact that people like being creative, and when technology (like YouTube) provides them with an outlet for their creativity, then they use it. ‘Success’ in Wu’s and Huberman’s terms is nice; but it’s not necessarily what it’s all about.
Lovely post in the Nicci French Blog
I just got back from doing the coast-to-coast bike ride, Whitehaven to Tyneside, with my stepson. I do a lot of exercise, regularly, relentlessly, grimly. He doesn’t do much at all, except as a by-product of something else. Over three days of cycling, I was in more pain day by day, and he was in less pain day by day. And now I feel pain in many muscles, joints and tendons, while his body has already forgotten all about it.
The words of the Leonard Cohen song keep coming in to my mind:
“Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey,
I ache in the places where I used to play.”
Beautiful ride, though.
The evolving story of the attack on Ian Tomlinson illustrates lots of things, many of them disturbing. For example, when did police officers on public duty start wearing balaclavas — as the guy who attacked Mr Tomlinson was? On the face of it, just about the only upside is the fact that citizens now have tools (cameraphones, small digital cameras and camcorders) which enable us to monitor and record the behaviour of police officers and other officials. If we’d had the same tools thirty years ago, the police officer who murdered Blair Peach, and the colleagues who covered up for him, might have been identified and maybe prosecuted.
So three cheers for the tools of citizen journalism? Celebrations might be premature. I suspect that the ‘system’ will not take this lying down. Since 9/11 we’ve seen extraordinary official repressiveness towards amateur photographers (see e.g. this post) trying to take photographs in what are clearly public places.
So here’s a prediction. We will see an adaptation of the time-honoured practice of stopping coaches bound for London-based demonstrations and searching everyone on board for ‘offensive’ weapons like bottles, marbles, ball-bearings, pepper, etc., all of which are then arbitrarily confiscated. The definition of ‘offensive’ will be extended to any electronic device capable of recording events. No doubt there is already a clause in the Public Order Acts which can be used to justify this. And if there isn’t, then I’m sure the Minister of the Interior, Jacqui Smith, can provide a Ministerial Order that will do the trick. After all, for a UK government with a big majority to get intrusive measures through Parliament is almost as straightforward as ordering ‘adult’ videos from Virgin.
Following my post about the assault on Ian Tomlinson at the G20 demonstrations, I had an email from a reader pointing me to a remarkable photograph on Flickr. Since it has an “All Rights Reserved” licence I can’t reproduce it, but you can find it here. Note the wording on the back of the cop’s jacket.