What is the 1% Rule for Second Life?
Charles Arthur had a fascinating article in the Guardian Unlimited yesterday about audience composition in sites that rely on user-created content.
He points to YouTube’s staggering statistics and says “The numbers are revealing: each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads. . . . 1,538 downloads per upload - and 20m unique users per month.” In other words, less than .1% of YouTubers are content creators. Similar numbers appear for Wikipedia and a variety of robust, community authored sites like Digg.com.
So what about Second Life? In the early days (3 years ago when there were only a few simulators and very little content), almost everyone was a content creators because there was very little else to do. I can remember that before I joined Linden Lab, there were 14,000 residents and the ratio of creators (which is obviously a hard term to define and measure, but that’s another subject) to consumers was something like 70%/30%. These days, with the advent of the free model, I would expect those numbers are more like 85%/15% and eventually, when Second Life has 3 million users, will look something like those at YouTube.
What do you think?
July 22nd, 2006 at 12:33 pm
The difference between YouTube and SecondLife is that SL has creation tools built into it. To make a video you need a camera and editing software at least. To make something in SL you only need SL. All of the new users I meet, my students especially, are fascinated by the creation tools in SL and set about learning them right away (at least to a cosmetic level even if they don’t learn to script). I really think that one of SL’s strenghts is the ease of creation within the world. If nothing else, the availability of the tools makes more a more informed consumer who can distinguish quality products being sold by others.
Intellagirl
July 22nd, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Good point Intellagirl.
I think the point I’m making is that despite the relative accessability of the creation tools, we can expect that over time the ratio of creators to consumers will decrease.
Let’s think about this in combination with my previous post regarding SL’s growth projections:
Imagine that a year from now there are 2 million residents of Second Life. What I’d predict would be that about 3 - 5% of those people would be “creators”. By today’s standards, we might consider that to be a radical decrease in “creative participation” in Second Life — what I’m arguing is that this is not just expectable — it’s also a healthy and normal progression. Let’s remember that 3 - 5 % of 2 million will still give us anywhere between 60K and 100K “creators”. That’s a lot of people actually building.
Additionally, it’s worth noting that a higher percentage of those people will still be engage in highly creative pursuits range from roleplay to mashing up pre-built objects (curating). Just as in the real world, the value chain will stretch and there will simply be less need for new users to actually bust out the build tools and build from scratch.
July 23rd, 2006 at 7:59 am
Also, with more and more talented designers in SL -now RL architecture studios are starting in SL- casual creators may feel that they cannot meet the SL standard.