[This falls into the category “Old News”, btw]
Recent research from the HP Laboratory, Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman, reiterates the motto “quality over quantity”. The paper called “Persistence and Success in the Attention Economy” (here the original source: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/persistence/persistence.pdf) says in its abstract:
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 YouTube revealed that the more frequently an individual uploads con- tent 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.
If you read the Wikipedia article on Attention Economy, it says:
Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.
The HP Laboratory paper is in a scientific style which would convey some sort of peer review (which I’m sure also happened, as HP Labs do publish some really serious stuff – I’m just pointing out that I have not done deep research whether this happened or not). The data the paper used is based on YouTube and from April 30, 2008, so about a year old. In the meanwhile, we had an economic crash and Twitter became mainstream.
The findings are somewhat paradoxical (“… it makes sense if you don’t think about it …”). Wu and Huberman define “success” as being in the top 1% of the weekly uploads. Here is the paradox:
About 21.0% of all successful users earned the success label with their first video. Given that only 5.9% of all videos are first submissions, this number is impressively large. What is even more impressive is that about 34.1% of the successful producers actually succeeded in their first week (i.e. at least one video they uploaded in their first week received top 1% popularity within that week).
However, an aspect that I would like to see discussed from a commercial aspect is the “commercial success” – what would their research look like if “success” would not be defined as the top 1% most popular uploads per week, but as the top 1% highest CPM (clicks-per-mille) on advertisement and ad prices on these pages. Here’s why I would like to see this:
1/
Do advertisers value the sheer number of hits, or are they equally attaching value to quality or brand of content? Is an ad space more valuable for content that is viewed by few, but these few are opinion or decision makers?
2/
What if the click-through rate of niche users is much higher than for the 1% most popular videos? What if niches can provide more relevant advertisements and hence increase click-through rates?
3/
Why isn’t the longtail thicker for YouTube? What conclusion does the longtail perception of YouTube combined with this study in reverse allow?
4/
What was the percentage of studio or professionally produced content? How is the change of YouTube mainstream affecting this research on UGC?
