Free content is “completely and blindly idiotic”

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Comment by Duncan A. MacRae on June 8, 2009 at 2:12pm

This caught my eye in an article on Slate.com this morning.

After examining some 300,000 Twitter accounts, a Harvard Business School professor reported last week that 10 percent of the service's users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. The study dovetails with recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen asserting that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Both findings suggest that, thus far, Twitter has been considerably better at signing up users than keeping them.

So the 10% (~9%) number appears again, strengthening my argument that in any given social medium, only a fraction of people will become active participants. There must be some name for this rule, until I find it I will temporarily refer to it as the MacRae 10% Principle.

Comment by Duncan A. MacRae on June 5, 2009 at 2:21pm

Newspapers in particular set themselves up for this decades ago by ignoring the value of unique coverage. By essentially handing over all their news coverage to new services they devalued their content in the eyes of readers enormously. I think that's why readers haven't been as loyal as some newspapers assumed they would be. For newspapers, I think the shift is now a fait accompli.

From my perspective, I hate to see professional associations lumping themselves in with mainstream media from a strategic standpoint (which is what I assert many of them did in the late-90s), because unlike newspapers they produce content that has a well-defined value that cannot be easily replicated. Giving away that content, or at least control of that content, was a serious error for many STM organizations.

As for the 9% comment, I think in many aspects it already has reached that plateau. The variable is not the social media itself, but simply human nature. Whether it's customer response cards, reader surveys or Twitter. Only a small % of any population has either the inclination or personality to post their thoughts publicly.

Comment by Andy on June 5, 2009 at 2:06pm

Do you think free content or user generated content will eventually slow down? Will the value of such an experience eventually run into the law of diminishing returns? Or it will user generated content only continue to trend upward? You mentioned in another post that only 9% of people use the comments section in certain web sites. Will social media eventually hit a plateau?

Could the newspapers get together and embark on a campaign to repeatedly communicate their benefits? In the article, the newspaper publisher was interested in giving people reasons to subscribe. Could publishing as an industry be doing a better job communicating the benefits of professional content? Could we speed the coming of diminishing returns for free content?