Nearly Half of U.S. 'Net Users Post Content

An anonymous reader copies and pastes: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly half of U.S. Internet users have built Web pages, posted photos, written comments or otherwise added to the enormous variety of material available online, according to a report released on Sunday. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that about 44 percent of the country's Internet users have created content for others to enjoy online." Don't read the blurb - cut straight to the study.

Seems low.

[eurleif]

That includes everyone who's responded to a blog entry, posted on a message board, etc.? It seems rather low. What would really be interesting is how many people have their own web page(s).

1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[Safety Cap]

So millions and millions of people post content, but how much is useful, easy to read, and informative? Probably less than one percent.

Created then abandonded

[foidulus]

It's amazing though how many people create these wonderful(or not so wonderful as your opinion may be) websites, then just abandon them. There was an article in the NYT a while ago(now it costs money) about how many bloggers haven't updated in a few months(the number was almost 50% IIRC) and how about 20% or so never got updated past the first post!
At least we have better search engines than we had a few years ago, I'm sure your all well aware of the frustration you encountered when searching for something meaningful and getting, "Jim's cool page of pics" etc.

3 Cheers for google!
Hip, hip, hooray!

So 56% of the net is composed of lurkers?

[Senjutsu]

That's actually quite a bit higher than I would have guessed.

How about companies?

[bc90021]

Just as interesting a study, I think, would be corporations that have posted or have websites vs. those that don't. We may take it for granted, but there are still a number of business (especially small businesses) that likely don't have a web presence.

Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[radicalskeptic]

Well, if you take slashdot as a cross section of the internet, it's actually much higher. I usually browse at score: 4 & 5, which means nearly all the posts I read are worth reading. The ratio of posts in an average story that reach 4 or 5 is usually at least 10%, sometimes over 20%. Of course, this is assuming Slashdot is a descent cross section of the internet, which I'm not sure is true, although it does have, what, nearly 800,000 users now?

Pruning for the public good?

[QuantumSpritz]

Makes me wonder - if all this content is in blog/comment format, what are we losing as we auto-prune our forums, our comments, out old stories? How to we save the nuggets and toss out the crap? Like BUMP posts - those should be confined to the seventh circle of hell. Dante, anyone?

Re:Heartwarming

[gid13]

As much as I love the idea of a "democratic" web, I have to disagree with more people creating content being a good thing. I've been arguing against copyright for a long time, and one of the reasons I do so is that it creates far too much of an incentive to create. It seems to me that we have a huge glut of material both on and offline. Having worked in a university bookstore for 4 years, I've personally seen how useless much of that content truly is.

Of course, it may be true that the more people creating FREE content, the better. Maybe. In any case, the main point I'm making is that as long as copyright law prevails over the net, I'd call it overly controlled.

Study Shows Half are Couch Potatoes

[billstewart]

While I'm sure the TV/Disney/Newsmonger conglomerates would like to think that "content" is something that they provide for us and we consume like good little couch potatoes, the really cool thing about the Internet is that anybody in the world can talk to anybody else, express themselves to the public, and provide valuable or entertaining information to the world. So the sad result of the study is that half the users don't seem to get it yet... How can we drag them in?

Of course, that doesn't invalidate Donaldson's Commentary ("Sturgeon was an optimist"), and there's lots of content that's not very interesting, but at least we need to get kids in the habit of providing things that are interesting to their friends and thinking of what they can do for society as a whole.

Where, not how much!

[SuperBanana]

All this is great and wonderful, but hides a serious problem. There are several problems facing the internet these days, IMHO. You can see the signs in the quality of link-quantified based search engines like google.

Problem #1: when people contribute, they do so on corporate sites. Epinions. Livejournal. Even Photo.net is a perfect example of the clustering that happens, as is mp3.com...and mp3.com is an even better example of the problems with this. a)someone else suddenly gets rights to your stuff, and b)when they disappear, so does a huge chunk(relatively) of the net. c)While all this web-application crap is lovely and cute, we've discovered that it costs money and you can't do it just off banner ads- so a large number of these companies fail pretty fast if they don't find some way to charge for it, and people don't like paying anyone but their ISP, really(and that won't change with micropayments, IMHO). Nobody realized that the only people who could afford to host pictures etc- were the ISPs themselves, because they're actually getting paid for your access. Shock, gasp- the old model was better than the new one.

Problem #2: overreliance on search engines. The web really isn't anymore- its more like a branched tree in many ways, because people don't rely on links from, say, their ISP's homepage. They fire up google instead. The internet is supposed to recover from major chunks disappearing, but what happens if google goes off the air tomorrow? I bet you'd see an immediate drop in traffic(well, aside from a hundred million people IM'ing/emailing each other saying "hey, did you know google is down?"). People would be lost. I remember in '96 I used my ISP's homepage as a jumping point; now that's virtually unheard of. People use portals, not their ISP's homepage- the predecessor to portals. Again, gasp, shock- the old system was better.

Problem #3: Companies that host these sites really don't like spiders; they suck up bandwidth and often cause dynamic apps to crumble under the load- I've seen it happen, and I've killed/blocked spiders myself because they would have run up enormous bandwidth bills(I help run a mailing list with about 11 years of archives). Either that, or the spider might not be able to index the dynamic content. Add this to point #1+2, and oops- a large chunk of content contributed by that 44% just dropped off the radar of the rest of the world...because remember how dependent we are on search engines like google?

Problem #4: people just don't link to stuff they like anymore, really. It used to be techno-gear-heads like us, and we usually posted our favorite links or even our bookmark files directly. Joe Shmoe doesn't. The mere fact that a very small bunch of people with blogs(not to mention the companies that manage to get 60 links to the same page into google results) can sway google is a perfect example of how few people link anymore off their homepages. Don't like it? Put up links to your favorite stuff on your homepage, and don't forget to use proper descriptive text(see the w3's homepage- "here" is a perfect example of what NOT to use between the A tags!)

And now, my head is about to explode from all this deep thinking :-) [discuss!]

Re:Where, not how much!

[Graymalkin]

...and don't forget to use proper descriptive text(see the w3's homepage- "here" is a perfect example of what NOT to use between the A tags!)

No kidding. Here [google.com].

Re:Study Shows Half are Couch Potatoes

[91degrees]

I suspect that the other half of the users tend not to use the web that much. They'll occasionally use it if an email tells them to click on a link, and they might look at an online news site, but they don't spend hours a day browsing.

While the web can be useful, from a marketing point of view, it has always really been just an initial incentive. People thought they wanted the web, but they kept their internet connection because they want email, IM, and Kazaa.

Yeah, right...

[Ancient Devices King]

According to them, only 2% of adult American internet users visit "adult websites" on a typical day.

More seriously though, I find it hard to believe that only 54% of adults with internet access use that access on a typical day.

Good for the US and all, but..

[cmacmanus]

Despite the fact that most of the people who populate the internet are from North America, what are the statistics for the rest of the world?

Re:And yet broadband providers CRIPPLE us.

[cpghost]

and by gutting upload speeds to pathetically low rates of transfer.

It would be nice if ADSL were extended to allow a kind of "reverse bandwidth" command. This command could be used dynamically by the customer's [router's] IP stack, e.g. like this: "As long as there's nothing receive, allow maximal outbound bandwidth. As soon as content is received, reverse direction."

BTW, not all providers' policies forbid servers. It's just a matter of switching to more user-friendly companies.

The biggest problem for Joe Schmoe is finding suitable DNS providers for their brand new domain name. DynDNS, ZoneEdit etc... will not continue to provide this for free for very long...

How about companies?-Unecessary.

[Anonymous Coward]

"We may take it for granted, but there are still a number of business (especially small businesses) that likely don't have a web presence."

Nor do they need one. It's a common misconception. A "keeping up with the jones".

"created content for others to enjoy" ?

[+ve_flow]

hmm, "create content for others to enjoy" this is quite dubious. From my experience only a minimal amount of content provides me with enjoyment and advances my position along this positive path. Hence the reason i take my input from moderated and colaborative sources(eg slashdot.org +3 and news.google.com) in order that which I wish to avoid.

Re:Heartwarming

[mpe]

As much as I love the idea of a "democratic" web, I have to disagree with more people creating content being a good thing. I've been arguing against copyright for a long time, and one of the reasons I do so is that it creates far too much of an incentive to create.

It's worth asking if copyright actually does provide such an incentive. It being kind of hard to see how something which outlives its creator by nearly a century can motivate anyone :)

Re:Pruning for the public good?

[adpowers]

That is why you never delete or prune anything. I was involved in a local online community as one of the sys admins. I set the message board to have no pruning and I would never delete threads (just lock them at worst). Unfortunately, there were other admins as well. They decided to prune stuff and delete posts. This is one of the largest reasons for leaving the community, I feel stuff should never be removed from the internet. Thank Jah we have archive.org.

Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read a thread with a +4 threshold, then you will all the recent posts that have not had a chance to receive an eventual +4 or +5 rating. I wish there was a way to request only the subset of posts that have been rated interesting or informative by at least one moderator. That wouldn't solve the case of omitting worthwhile posts that haven't been moderated yet, but it would reduce the effect of excluding underrated posts.

Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[thogard]

One man's garbage is anothers treasure. I've got nearly 200 meg of junk on my site but according to google some of the info is only on my site. For example, packet dumps of a nasty phone system as well as how get the thing to spit out the GPL. I've got obscure hints on fixing an old VW. This stuff is completely useless to 99.99+% of the population but when you need it, its there. I get a few messages a day from people that found it and when it saves someone a few hours, its worth it.

Depends on where your post your stuff

[FePe]

How your content (comments, photos, files etc.) is being valued is also related to where you put it on the Net. Sites like Slashdot is reliable, which means that a bad comment posted here will be more valued than a comment posted on a personal homepage. A site like photo.net [photo.net] is a very good place to upload your pictures, and though your picture isn't considered of high quality, all other pictures on the site add up to a relatively high quality overall.

Bias in the Other Direction

[Jonathan Quince]

Yes, this is a source of potential bias.

Internet users are more likely to hang up the phone on telemarketers or surveys.

(Lies, damn lies, and motivations ascribed to people about whom no real data exists.)

Re:Where, not how much!

[ultranova]

There's two possible solutions for these problems.

The first is rather obvious. Simply have peole run their own servers. If you post your stuff on a computer you own and run yourself, it won't disappear unless you make it. Unfortunately the current payment model for bandwith (pay by megabytes sent) is essentially broken, and thus forces ISP's to ban home-users from using servers, either directly or by making upstream bandwith ridicilously low, and implement arbitrary download/upload limits and other such nonsense. Payment model needs to be changed for this model to be viable.

The other possible solution is to use the various P2P networks to serve HTML pages. Freenet currently has such a thing (FProxy), but it can be made to work on pretty much any network.

One would write a website and then give it to an insert processor. That processor would rewrite all the links to point to localhost and SHA1 value of the file. The web page and other files would then be inserted to a folder under the local shared files managed by the proxy, with the SHA1 hash of the file as filename. A description of the website would be inserted into an webproxy-index-xxxxxx file, where xxxxxx is a string of random characters. The proxy's would use existing search function of the network to locate these index files; then, when you wanted to browse this KazaaWeb, you would simply point your browser to localhost:9999, choose the site you wanted to go to, and the proxy would search and download the corresponding file. Pictures and other references would cause the browser to request them from the proxy as from any other server, resulting them being downloaded too. The proxy would cache and share downloaded content for a while, to prevent the slashdot effect by making more popular content available from more places. Because the proxy would know the SHA1 values of the files, it would be easy to filter out fake/corrupted files, and it would be equally easy to implement content signatures. Big files would be automatically chopped at insert and reassembled at receipt to prevent some potential problems. In short, it would be Freenet without strong anonymity, but much better performance. And it would give P2P networks some much needed legitimacy.

As a side node, it would probably be a good idea to also offer a Freenet-compatible protocol for such a proxy, to make any insertion and other tools to allow one to replace the KazaaNet with FreeNet, should the need for stronger anonymity rise.

Comments ?

Re:Created then abandonded

[chthon]

It's true.

I have tried to setup two websites and maintain them. It takes time and perseverance. The main reason is that most of the time there are more pressing needs, and after working a couple of weeks on the content of a website tiredness sets in.

If I had more hours on a day it would be possible, but I need time to prepare courses, to cook food, to be busy with my wife and family, to investigate Linux matters, all things that have more immediate return than setting up a web site, certainly if you do not get any feedback (even to say that things are wrong or missing).

Jurgen

AP would beg to differ -- Only 2-7% keep Blogs

[Patik]

According to this AP article [myway.com] personal content is very low. It talks mostly about blogs, but I think there is some correlation between that and this story.

Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Well, of course, if they're old enough, records of daily life can be fascinating to regular (okay, kinda geeky) people as well as historians. E.g., my grandmother has been translating my great-great-nth-great grandmother's diary out of rather archaic French for several years now. She was a young bride (sixteen years old, something like that) whose merchant husband brought her to Haiti in the 1700's. Most of her writing is, "It's hot here, there are lots of mosquitoes, I want to go home" -- stuff that would seem pretty boring and banal at the time, but now it seems fascinating simply because of its age.

Of course, it seems rather unlikely that anyone's LJ is going to be available for their remote descendants to read. Which is kind of a pity.

Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[mdwh2]

If you're using LiveJournal to read entries of random strangers, then I'd say you're missing the point of it. I use it for journalling for my own purposes, and for communicating with people I know (either in real life or online). Regarding the latter, Livejournal is generally a lot better for this than email IMO, for various reasons.

And this applies regarding the original point about the Internet as a whole. It's not that most stuff is necessarily rubbish, but that most stuff is not (and not meant to be) relevant to a given individual. An important factor, aside from raw numbers, or useful percentage of content, is how easy it is to find content that is useful to you.

Re:Where, not how much!

[jp10558]

I have to disagree about Yahoo though. They managed for me(and many people I know) to morph from a "portal" to a "destination". No one I know goes to Yahoo to find another website. They go there for a service. Yahoo does E-mail, they have online games(ask highschool and college students about yahoo pool), they have the great Yahoo Groups service, which is the mailing list provider I see most nowadays for small groups. They have their briefcase(great free storage for small docs you want to have everywhere). They have movie and TV listings.

My point here is that they have lots of services that people want. Heck - Yahoo Chat. So it's not about where people are going from Yahoo, it's about why people are coming to Yahoo.

I'm not sure Yahoo has much competition anymore for the mailing list/chat/stupid online game category anymore. Most basic internet users I've talked to will point to Yahoo when I ask where they go for a chatroom. And believe me they have no idea what IRC is.

As to stock quotes - web sites with them are a dime a dozen. But you know what? If I just want a quote - off the top of my head I can think of two places. Yahoo and my Stock Broker Webpage. Which is faster if I want a quote(don't want to buy RIGHT NOW)? Yahoo. Granted this may be because Ameritrade only seems to work with IE, or a better statement is it doesn't like Opera, whereas Yahoo doesn't care. I tend to spend very little time on sites that need IE.

Re:so thats where...

[The Snowman]

...half the trash comes from.

Speaking of trash, I wonder how many end users contribute to television?

Maybe that is why I find the Internet much more interesting and useful...

The Fish Tank Channel

[Reziac]

A few decades ago, a small local cable company set an unused channel to a camera pointing at a fish tank in their office, and there it stayed for several years.

When they finally got another feed and switched the channel to that, they were flooded with complaints! Seems a significant chunk of their subscribership left their TVs tuned to "the fish channel" much of the day, and were quite upset when it was no longer available.

Upshot: the cable company switched the channel back to showing the fish tank.

Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is crap

[rbird76]

1) Everyone disagrees on which 10% (or less) is not crap.

2) Without the ability for unqualified people to post uninteresting content, the people who have something to express and the ability to express it well might never do so (because they might never think to do so, or because they have a lower opinion of their output than is deserved)..

I don't want someone (not necessarily, just some power in general) telling other people what they should and shouldn't post because it isn't likely that the reviewer knows exactly what is and is not crap. The torrent of useless data isn't good, but my chance of finding something in that pile is nonzero (but low); if it isn't there, my chance of finding the desired information is exactly zero.