Numbers of involvement via YouTube

von Roland Hachmann | Mai 22, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture

I just followed a link from the Church of the Customer Blog to a movie on YouTube, which is currently highly popular. It had 9 million views on Friday, when the post was written – now it has 12 million. That is an amazingly quick growing number, if anything. But looking at the rest of the numbers, I started thinking about the numbers of participation.

• The video has been viewed 12 Million times.
• 18245 people put it into their favourites, i.e. found it somewhat remarkable
• 9340 people bothered to rate it, i.e. even forming an opinion on it
• 2566 people even went through the effort of writing a comment (and some are just very short!)

These are amazing figures. The number of views in general, but also the number of comments. Heck, it’s a video about a guy doing dance moves to songs of about 20 years of pop&rock history – everyone will have done or seen a couple of these! In theory, there could be 12 million comments.

But of course, there are not that many. Because for any given subject, you will have a small, active audience, and a large, passive audience.

Hence this is one way of getting guestimates of „response rates“ on the web. Other than just responses via comments – because these always existed on many different sites.
I can’t think of too many other sites, where stats on viewings and following responses (favourites, ratings) are that readily available.

In this case, only 0,022% of the 12 million felt like leaving a comment. Nevermind the fact that there are almost 2600 comments for that one post, which is a huge number, the participation is relatively minimal. Or so it seems at first. But maybe this is just a very „normal“ number?

(Mind you, if we speak in marketing terms: there isn’t an offer nor an incentive attached to participating…)

Radio 1’s One Big Second Life Weekend

von Roland Hachmann | Mai 14, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture

A post at psfk pointed me to the fact that BBC 1 is doing a huge party in Dundee, Scotland, for real, and in Second Life, for virtual. They also pointed me to Wonderland who have some more detail on that party.

I myself stumbled upon that party just a few hours ago, however by accident. I tried Second Life for the first time today and tried to find places with lots of stuff happening.
Sofar, I noticed a lot of Casinos and places for „mature“ events, if you know what I mean. Having spent 2 hours in there, I could easily get the impression the whole place is a giant virtual red light district. On the other hand, I have seen a couple of places that look like good old suburbia, almost like Brookfield, Wisconsin, where I spent a year during a highschool exchange…

I saw many strange things in my first two hours in Second Life – may be I will open up a whole new blog category and write posts just on that.

But back to the topic: I noticed a lot of avatars spending their time at one single location, which turned out to be the BBC Site:

Now it looks rather empty, but when I first got there it was literally packed

I didn’t know at that time that this is a special event – instead I was quite impressed that the BBC does what I considered a sponsorship of a certain „party-location“.

Now, as I know the background, I am even more impressed: they take a real event online into a virtual world to let everyone outside Dundee, Scotland (i.e. everyone) take part in the event.

And they even get some advertising in there – at least some big circular billboards for artists that (I assume) they promote.

The economic, social and cultural consequences of web 2.0

von Roland Hachmann | Mai 7, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture

Grant McCracken wrote an interesting post about the economic, social and cultural consequences of the new Internet.

He lists four models, the first two are already widely discussed, the other two require some more thinking and even imagination about how the new social and cultural consequences could affect everyday life.

Model one: disintermediation
This one is pretty clear. The web reduces the friction we experienced through intermediaries. People or organisations whose only raison d’etre was the fact that they had better information or contacts than the average Joe. And Joe would pay lots of money to access that information or those contacts.
The web puts an end to most assymetric information. And hence it also reduces demand for many of these intermediaries.

Model two: long tail
This term nowadays belongs to Chris Anderson, who writes a blog about this topic, but is also writing a book on it. (The blog is actually a „diary“ of him writing the book.)
The long tail means: there is demand for everything. Might be small, but it exists. In his Audio Interview with the Economist, Chris tells us how he came to think about the fact that aside from the obvious „hits“ in each product or service category, there is an abundance of individual demand for any other thing possibly on offer. Because with perfect knowledge of what’s out there, someone will always find out what you have to offer. And the web now offers this 20:20 vision of the supply curve.

Model three: reformation
This is a little more tricky. Grant is an anthropologist, hence his enthusiasm:

It became clear eventually that these people were reforming personhood and the self. The self was not merely better connected, but now more porous, more distributed, more cloud like. This cultural fundamental, the definition of what and who a person is, was changing. [..] The reformation model says fundamental categories of our culture (particularly the self and the group and the terms with which we think about them) are changing.

Model four: continuous presense (everything and everyone all the time)
We will have more ways to connect to people, than we will want to have at any point in time.

our economic, social and cultural destination might be this: we will be continuously connected to all knowledge and all people with a minimum of friction, and priviledge will be measured, in part, by how good are the filters with which we make contact with all but only the people and knowledge we care about

The mobile phone already makes us present at all times: if you don’t pick up the phone or don’t answer SMS within a certain time period, people will start to wonder. The messenger services add to this, people can always see when your online. Recently I don’t always show up as „online“ in the messengers I use (I use almost all of them, because my contacts/buddies are scattered across all major brands). I just don’t want people to know how much time I spend in front of the computer 😉 – no, in reality, I don’t want them to think I am ready to answer their questions/requests, etc any time, just because „I am online“. Being online doesn’t necessarily mean I am in the mood for a conversation.