Update: several conversations with the CNN press office later it turns out that of the 2,300-strong sample, 1,641 are categorised as "sharers" so that 87% of content sharing appears to be undertaken by...actually, about 20% of the online population, 19 and a bit per cent. Or to put it another way, I guessed completely wrong and the 80/20 rule appears, against all my expectations, to be in operation here. Looks for the moment like getting people to share content is at least 20 times easier than getting them to create it. Wow.
27% of people are responsible for sharing 87% of content, says CNN's new "pownar" research paper. That looks like huge news - not because it's so few people making the majority of the action, but because it's so many. The survey looked at 2,300 people globally and from that impressively large sample found that news shared (via social media, email etc) was more valuable in marketing terms and concluded that the important thing is to reach that 27% of people who do most of the sharing.
Jemima Kiss, writing in the Guardian, appears to find this pretty much as expected, saying that this "tall(ies) with previous definitions of a minority of highly active web web users that contribute a majority of content online". CNN's press release suggests that "the 80/20 rule applies to the findings".....which is odd, and extremely surprising, because "the 80/20 rule" applies to very little else in this space.
Rather, Jakob Nielsen's 90:9:1 rule of participation inequality applies pretty consistently to online contributions and contributors, with 1% of users making almost all of the noise, 9% occasionally chipping in and 90% passively consuming or, as Nielsen puts it, "lurking". Look at blogging, where 0.1% of the online population make a post each day. Look at Wikipedia, where 2/3rds of the edits are contributed by the most active 1,000 Wikipedians (0.003% of its US audience, or looked at another way fewer active contributors than were on the 1911 Britannia). 27% of people being responsible for sharing 87% of content would be a big deal and a massively different result to the one anyone watching this space would have expected.
So CNN's findings are far more interesting, and far more surprisng, than CNN seems to be saying. Ask people to contribute - to write, post, comment, blog, upload, publish - and 1%, often vastly fewer, will normally play. Ask them to share and apparently 27% of them will get heavily involved.
Except the research doesn't really say that. Reading the small print in the actual press release that 2,300 sample contained a sub-category of "frequent sharers", defined as those sharing more than six links a week. The 27% figure is really taken from amongst those frequent sharers. How large is the frequently sharer subset? I called CNN's press office first thing this morning to ask that very question and spoke to some very nice people but at time of writing (three and a half hours later) await a reply.
I'm going to take a massive guess here. I bet once you've filtered that 2,300 people for the "frequent sharers" subset that the headline messages actually seem to be about, and then take the 27% of them that are sharing almost all of the content, it's going to be...oh, about 1%. Not necessarilly exactly 1% - sharing content, even sharing it frequently, isn't as big an investment as writing something from scratch. But I bet it's in that order of magnitude, something in the low single figures. Fifty to a hundred people, maybe, out of two and a half thousand. If I hear anything either way from the pownar guys, I'll let you know.
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