 |
|
|
Content Nation: A World of Personal
Publishers Declares Their Influential Citizenship |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
24 July 2006 |
|
|
|
|
A recent poll by the Pew Internet & American Life Project
reveals that most of the people in the U.S. who are
publishing weblogs are interested in a creative outlet for
communicating with friends and family. But a significant
percentage of survey respondents see influencing others as
a prime motivator in publishing weblogs. If you scale up
the survey data for weblog influence-seekers to its likely
global proportions you wind up with the 65th largest nation
in the world getting the attention of the third largest
nation in the world. This Content Nation is shaping the
world's communications far faster and deeper than even the
most sanguine enthusiasts for personal publishing can
imagine - and they've only just begun. |
|
What does it mean to be a
publisher? This was a fairly simple question to answer little
more than a decade ago. But now with weblogs, wikis and other
easy-to-use publishing tools that make it easy for millions
worldwide to express themselves online it's a question with
very fuzzy answers at times. A
recent poll by the Pew Internet & American Life Project
gathered an interesting picture as to what kinds of people are
generating their own content online and why. The study found
that the major reason most people use (52 percent) use weblogs
is to have a creative outlet, with only 7 percent citing making
money as a major motivation. In other words, for most people
just the joy of publishing is enough to motivate people to give
it a try. We're creative beings by design, for the most part,
destined to shape our thoughts and feelings into personal
publishing artifacts for the world to discover.
But the Pew study shows that many people want to have a
platform as well as a creative outlet. 29 percent of
respondents cited motivating other people to action as a major
reason for weblogging, with more than 61 percent saying that
inciting people to action was either a major or minor reason. A
similar 27 percent want to influence other people's thinking as
a major motivator. The Pew report played this factor down in
saying that "just half say they are trying to influence the way
other people think" to highlight the pervasiveness of less
public uses. But wait. If, as the report says, there are about
twelve million adult bloggers in the U.S., then that means that
there are more than three million webloggers in the U.S.
alone who have trying to persuade the thinking of others on the
Web as a prime motivator - including, but not limited to, the
57 million adult Americans who read weblogs today.
Let's round this up to a global guesstimate for a moment. A
recent survey by comScore Networks gives us data showing
that the U.S. has only about 22 percent of the world's Internet
users. Using that figure as a corollary to scale the Pew data
that would give us more than 13.6 million adults in the
world trying to influence other people via weblogs alone, much
less other personal media. That's a pretty small group out of
some 6.5 billion people in the world, but it's significantly
more than all of the professional publishers in the world put
together. Or to put it in perspective from another angle using
recent data, if this group of influencers were their own
country they'd be the 65th largest nation in the world. There
is truly a Content Nation out there, a growing body of
opinion-makers who are influencing individuals and institutions
as never before on a wide variety of issues.
This is not to downplay the wider and more playful nature of
weblogs revealed in the Pew data: it's very important to
recognize that the creative content which entertains us is
coming from a vast pool of people who are going to absorb our
general attention more and more as people use the Web to find
authentic views of the world. But it's equally important to
recognize that the pool of people who view weblogs and other
personal media tools as ways in which they can have a say in
all kinds of matters - personal, politics, business, finance -
reaches far beyond the handful of well-known webloggers who are
cited in the mainstream media.
Individually the influence of these publishers is relatively
insignificant - a couple of dozen people at most would be
typical for many and far less when you get down the
Long
Tail curve. But even if these webloggers averaged only
about twenty-four unique individuals who experience their
posts, in sum the nation of people potentially influenced by
webloggers seeking influence would be the fourth largest
nation in the world - comfortably ahead of the United
States in population. The enormous potential of this publishing
medium in the hands of people who want to influence others
poses both opportunities and challenges to both traditional
publishers and society as a whole.
For traditional publishers, the influence and attention
gained by these millions of micro-audiences has the potential
to dilute greatly both the attention and the influence that
other sources of opinion and insight offer. Yet the data from
the Pew study reinforces the view that major media outlets are
probably benefiting from the presence of webloggers in a large
way: 72 percent of the polled bloggers look for information
about politics online, significantly ahead of the 58 percent of
Internet users who do so in according to Pew research. With
influential webloggers large and small, media outlets have an
opportunity to have their content - and advertisements - drawn
into communities driven by the opinion-makers who consume them.
But this may pose a problem for advertisers in the long run:
if people are listening to webloggers as a primary source of
content, how much attention and influence is going to be left
over to be harvested by traditional advertising in traditional
media outlets? The influencing of opinion on many commercial,
public and personal levels is shifting far more rapidly than we
may imagine as a result of personal publishing technologies
such as weblogs. It requires both publishers and producers to
be armed with content that's ready not only for a consuming
audience but an influencing audience from its first appearance
online.
The nation-sized scale of influence-seeking webloggers does
need to be taken in perspective: it's only a fraction of total
audiences that read them as of yet and a relatively small
portion of people producing them with any degree of regularity
or quality. But the Pew data suggests that 80 percent of
webloggers have started publishing only in the last three
years: Content Nation's influence is in its infancy. Content
Nation is a nation of publishers whose citizens are only
beginning to understand the importance of their role. To those
who can I say: be a citizen. To those who discount their
influence: be prepared to have them change your mind.
-
John Blossom
To top of
page
 |
