Web 2.0: User-Generated Content in Online Communities

Bachelorarbeit von Timo Beck

Abstract:

The number of Internet users is steadily growing. Currently, 55% of all Germans go online on a regular basis compared to 28% in 2001 – and there is no end in sight to this upward trend. Today’s young people are growing up with the Internet and the Internet is growing up with them. It is evolving: the term for what is happening now in cyberspace is "Web 2.0", an expression coined at a conference in 2004 by the web-business mogul Tim O'Reilly, to describe a new evolutionary phase of the Internet. The phrase is shorthand for the second Internet boom, which now follows the one that ended in late 2001 with the biggest destruction of investors' capital in history.

The bursting of the so-called dotcom bubble 6 years ago marked a turning point for the web. At that time, many people concluded that the Internet was over-hyped. Bubbles and the subsequent shakeouts, however, appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. They have always marked the point at which real success stories developed their full scope and showed their strength.

The defining feature of the current evolutionary phase of the web is that established companies are giving huge amounts of money to start-ups which have three things in common: they have grown from nowhere with astonishing speed; they often have no revenue stream to speak of; and most of their content is produced by their users. Google paid $ 1.65bn for the acquisition of Youtube, Rupert Murdochs’s News Corp. bought Myspace for $ 580m, and Holzbrinck fully took over Studivz.net for about € 85m, to give just a few examples of recent “Web 2.0 deals”.

Consequently, many people are asking a legitimate question: What makes these so-called online communities so valuable? The answer to this question may be surprising to many people: The deployed technologies are more or less the same as 6 years ago, but what all these new sites share is a new approach to creating things: "user-generated content", in the jargon. The Internet is no longer about corporations telling users what to do, think or buy; it is about the content people create themselves. Participation, not publishing, is the keyword. In online communities people’s private lives and experiences dominate conversations: sex, destinies, misfortune and luck, holidays, pets, sports, music, and lots of everyday life.

More people use the Internet to participate in online communities than to make purchase transactions. 84% of Internet users have contacted or participated in a community, and the growth in membership size and usage is expected to continue.

This development is particularly interesting for corporations which have noticed the importance and potential of the “do-it-yourself Web” as both a strategic marketing tool and a source of valuable information about consumer preferences and opinions. Tomorrow’s consumers will no longer be interested in what companies say about their products and services, they will rely on opinions of other “normal” people. Chris Anderson, chief editor of Wired Magazine, states: “Your brand is what Google says about it. Not what you say about it”.

One could ask if such a development leads to a loss of control and efficiency of marketing and market research. But according to Ralf Heller, CEO of the Virtual Identity AG, Web 2.0 only uncovers the long-prevailing reality of product communication and research. Managers should make use of those new possibilities instead of being afraid of them (Zunke 2006).

Corporations which have spent huge amounts of money on questionable market research projects in the past can get even better information for free in the future, as consumers and interested users exchange experiences and opinions about brands and products in online discussion forums anyway. As a result, marketing activities and product offers can be perfectly customized by gathering, processing and analyzing information about consumer preferences – it remains to be seen which companies will exploit these new opportunities and which will not.

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Kapitel 2.5, Participation Inequalities and Lurkers:

Until today, all emprical studies that have examined the relationship between the number of users and user contributions in online communities consistently found that the minority of particpants produce the majority of messages and that non-posters far out-number posters.

In 1992 Smith tried to explore the relationship between the membership size and user-contributions in his study of “The Well”, one of the first successful online communities. He found that 1% of members generated 50% of all postings on the Well.

According to a study of Katz, 90% of all online community members have never posted a message to their community.

Rafaeli and LaRose examined North American online message boards and discovered a positive, but non-linear relationship between group size and contributions. They concluded that the number of inactive users increases much faster than the number of active users.

Likewise, Whittaker’s study of 2.15 million Usenet postings from 500 newsgroups over a 6-month period in 1998 did not show a linear relationship between user population and user contribution neither. He found “(…) massive participation inequalities between different people in a given newsgroup”.

In 2001, Butler studied more than 500 social-, hobby-, and work mailing lists over a 4-month period. Consistent with earlier research in this field, his results revealed that fewer than 50% of subscribers posted even a single message over the period of 122 days.

Jakob Nielsen recently studied the phenomenon of participation inequalities in large online communities. He proposes the so called 90-9-1 rule for user participation, which is widely accepted among researchers today:

- 90% of users don’t contribute at all.

- 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.

- 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions.

According to Nielsen, blogs and wikis have even worse participation inequalities than is evident in most online communities. Therefore, he suggests a 95-5-0.1 rule for blogs and a 99.8-0.2-0.003 rule for wikis. Besides those rules, Nielsen states that there is no way to overcome those inequalities. In the best case they could be reduced by measures such as increasing usability, rewarding particpants for contributing and promoting quality contributions.

Since a few years, researchers as well as online community users often use the term “lurkers” for people who do not participate in conversations. In their pioneer work, Kollock and Smith described lurkers as free-riders, who are selfish, noncontributing and resource-taking members that harm an online community. Especially entrepreneurs who use online communities in order to increase e-commerce sales, view lurkers as a problem as lots of participation should create an attractive shopping environment, draw people to the community and keep them there – a concept known as stickiness. Further, if companies use web postings for generating customer feedback, they often receive unrepresentative results that reflect the notions of a few people only due to massive lurker rates.

Many online community members, however, regard lurkers as being not that negative: The Internet Jargon Dictionary defines lurker as “One of the ‘silent majority’ in an electronic forum; one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group’s postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is casually used reflexively: “Oh, I’m just lurking.” When a lurker speaks up for the first time, this called ‘delurking’”.

This definition suggests that lurking is a normal behaviour of the majority of the user population of online communities and that lurking can be defined in terms of the level of participation, either as no posting at all or as posting occasionally. For the purpose of this study, however, it is essential to get an insight into people’s resaons for not participating in order to enable community developers and managers to counteract and to increase the level of user contributions.

Since 1999 Preece and Nonnecke have conducted extensive research on lurking. In their large 2004 study “The Top 5 Reasons for For Lurking”, Preece and Nonnecke interviewed 219 lurkers, identified their reasons for not contributing to online discussion forums and put them into five main categories.