Degrees of Participation

Now that the major US players (GYM) have got their super-communities up and running we are starting to hear some great insights about the consumer dynamics that Umair highlighted below.  Bradley's Horowitz's post about the way Yahoo views its audience is attracting a lot of attention and debate.  He (as head of Tech Dev Yahoo Search) says the company sees the audience as a kind of pyramid of participation: 1 creator for every 10 synthesizers for every 100 consumers.  Horowitz says that 100 per cent participation is neither desirable or practical but goes onto stress that the pyramid is an observation not a strategy.  That doesn't stop Greg Yardley from suggesting that this view is restricting Yahoo's vision: "If you expect the bulk of your users to be passive gawkers your thinking’s never going to stray from CPM ad space. How disappointing - since it is possible to design a service that demands creation, and such services are far stickier than ones built around showing ads to passive surfers. To compete, Yahoo’s new services need 90% creators, not 1% or 10%."  And for a tremendous take on the data side of the Web 2.0 world check out Tom Coates presentation. (Via Bubblegeneration).