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.

Comments

so thats where...

[Anonymous Coward]

...half the trash comes from.

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).

Re:Seems low.

[woohoodonuts]

or set up "Web cams" to allow others to see live pictures.

and judging from my email... at least half of that 44% is 18 year old HOT & HORNY Amsterdam teens!!!!

ps... wanna see my webcam? I'm waiting for you.... just go to--.....

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.

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

[Belzu]

It becomes the functional equivalent of tossing the English Alphabet at a million monkeys. Shakespeare will NOT emerge from it.

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

[leifbk]

I think it's too often stated that the net "democratizes". The true beauty of the net is that it pluralizes.

You'got a very good point.

I think that Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" may be wrong. Actually, anyone of us can be famous to 15 other persons instead. All it takes is to set up a decent website and fill it with content that in some way feels important to oneself.

I run a Norwegian website called Solumslekt with a fairly big genealogy database (yes, I'm in the "senior" group), and in a couple of years I've gathered quite a group of attenders who are hanging around on the discussion forum.

For more than 99% of the Web audience my site is probably worthless, but among the few who share my interests, I've earned myself some good reputation.

I pay the equivalent of twenty bucks a month for professional web hosting, and I think it's worth it. Writing a book isn't my idea of fun, and most genealogy books don't return the investment anyway. It's so much easier to publish on the web.

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

[smallpaul]

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

You might as well ask what percentage of information transported over the telephone is useful, easy to read and informative? Who cares? People are communicating with other people and the quality of the communication is (as another poster said) in the eye of the beholder. A dump of pictures from my wedding is probably dreck to you but interesting to my mother in law.

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.

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

[ultranova]

Try taking Livejournal as the cross section though. That's when the useful content plummets to almost nil.

Diaries of unknown people are unlikely to be usefull to anyone except historians. Why would knowing about my day to day life be usefull to you ?

To make actually usefull content, like games, stories, pictures or music, requires some actual effort. Blogs and diarys can be entertaining, but they are unlikely to be usefull.

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

[pjt33]

If you go to Preferences | Comments you can give a +6 bonus to interesting and informative posts.

I don't believe it.

[Odinson]

Who would post online? Not me!

I wonder...

[natrius]

Do posts made by AC trolls count?

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!

in a related study

[Peeet]

there's about 800,000 users whose sole purpose seems to be to take that content down, one site at a time...

And sometimes we even turn on eachother.

Telephone sampling

[venicebeach]

The study notes that the response rate was 32.8%, meaning that the vast majority of people who were called refused to participate in the survey. This is a potential source of bias in the sample. I can certainly see those who are more eager about their internet use being more likely to participate in the study to brag about their contributions to the internet. The numbers do seem kind of high to me.

Summaries

[GoodbyeBlueSky1]

I figure after the site gets hammered, and before someone posts a mirror for the PDF, or just as a preview, or if you don't wanna read the whole thing, or if you're a robot whose job it is to read /., here's the "Summary" section of the report (I apologize for the K-whoring):

-----
In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet &
American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the
Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and
otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Some 44% of the
nation's adult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:

21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.

20% say they have allowed others to download music or video files from their
computers.

17% have posted written material on Web sites.

13% maintain their own Web sites.

10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have
posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.

8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.

7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong
such as church or professional groups.

7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see
live pictures of them and their surroundings.

6% have posted artwork on Web sites.

5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.

4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.

3% have contributed video files to Web sites.

44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through
building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files
Content Creation Online

2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone
survey. In other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in
early 2004, we have heard that between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have
created diaries or blogs. In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read
the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. About a third of these blog visitors have
posted material to the blog.
Most of those who do contribute material are not constantly updating or freshening
content. Rather, they occasionally add to the material they have posted, created, or
shared. For instance, more than two thirds of those who have their own Web sites add
new content only every few weeks or less often than that. There is a similar story related
to the small proportion of Americans who have blogs.

The most eager and productive content creators break into three distinct groups:

Power creators are the Internet users who are most enthusiastic about contentcreating
activities. They are young - their average age is 25 - and they are more
likely than other kinds of creators do things like use instant messaging, play games,
and download music. And they are the most likely group to be blogging.

Older creators have an average age of 58 and are experienced Internet users. They
are highly educated, like sharing pictures, and are the most likely of the creator
groups to have built their own Web sites. They are also the most likely to have used
the Internet for genealogical research.

Content omnivores are among the heaviest overall users of the Internet. Most are
employed. Most log on frequently and spend considerable time online doing a
variety of activities. They are likely to have broadband connections at home. The
average age of this group is 40.
----

Survey Says...

[Ray Radlein]

According to the study, 44% of all internet users have contributed something of value to the content of the internet.

The other 56% argue about vi vs emacs.

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!]

And 99% of it is crap

[jaltoids]

OK

Buying a copy of word and sitting down and typing isnt going to make you a writer

Buying a copy of dreamweaver (or shudder front page) isnt going to make you a web designer. People do things on the web that they would never do in their front yard. How many of you have seen those garish sites that make you want to cry, or your eyes bleed? People have forgotten that the web is a PUBLIC space, it is one giant central park.

Just because you can do something dosen't mean you should, and people posting on the web need to remember this!

Re:And 99% of it is crap

[Peeet]

Central park, maybe not; no one ever forces you to look at their site. it's hard to put an analogy on the web and peoples personal sites because posting a personal site simultaneously (sp?) puts it at the same level as the largest most visited site on the net and the smallest least known pointless site. It's one giant level playing field where one site is never more or less accesible than another (all of this disregarding some variables like the slashdot effect or search engines or simplicity of domain name)

The point is, anyone can put stuff up and I think should be encouraged. It's not like this weighs the internet down and slows it down for the rest of us, at least as far as i know, but it instead adds another node of possible information. I don't know how many times I have received some sort of small snippet of useful information from someone's homepage or description or information of a personal hobby.

I also wish sometimes that people would post more of their stuff into the sort of "public domain" that the internet creates. If I had time and bandwidth to spare, I would post sites that explain the simple steps of how to get started into projects or hobbies or school assignments that I have done or quick explanations that bridge those gaps left by hardcore enthusiasts who have whole webrings devoted to the advanced topics of some hobby, but no one gives a good introduction helpers to the basic beginner, amerateur (I mangled that spelling.) things to do or know. Like what was your first few weeks of learning directly after you discovered this thing's existance? **cough**linux**cough** What do all those damned abbreviations stand for or where did that weird nonsensical name come from? How does this compare to other options? We all have to relearn this and then after the frustration and steep learning curve, we never go back and try and make that easier for others, lessen the learning curve.

Yes there's a lot of crap websites out there, but what do you care? A) no one is forcing you to look at it and B) it doesn't slow down or bog the internet or take up precious space (although IP addresses could be argued) because it creates its own space to exist in as soon as it goes up. The internet is one of the most free open things in existance.

Crap is an inevitability in free/openness and is a good sign that it still is a free and open system. Embrace it.

Yeah, but we know what the real content is

[pdxdada]

By the numbers now, if 44% of people surveyed contribute content to the internet and 98% of the internet is porn, than a wopping 43% or about 120 million americans are involved in the porn industry. Statistics are a wonderful thing.

The biggest problem is getting to it.

[torpor]

I've been on the 'net since the early 80's, been involved with some big ISP startup moments in the 90's, and I've noticed that peoples 'net-sphere' grows rapidly when they first get on the 'net, and then consequently stabilizes.

What do I mean by net-sphere? The list of sites one visits daily, or regularly, for news/updates, etc. Apart from google queries, one rarely goes outside this net-sphere ...

For example, I visit a list of 5 sites daily. And when I'm done with those sites, I rarely visit any others, willingly, unless I happen to randomly come across something new that interests me.

It frustrates me to know end, knowing as I do at the end of my '5 site browse session' that there are probably at least 7 or 8 other sites out there which would interest me, and which would hold my interest, and which I would add to my list of 'net-sphere' sites... only how do I find them?

It'd be nice to have a site where I could go, plug in my 5 favourite (most-visited) sites, and get a list of recommendations for other sites to peruse/visit. I know sites like that exist ... but how do I find them?

Search engines only solve the search for things you know you want to look for ... but that leaves maybe 85% of the problem unsolved. "Search Engines" need to evolved more into "Recommendation Engines".

I'd happily subscribe to a list of 'cool sites to look out for', if I could, say, plug in answers to a ton of questions about the things I like, and if that service was smart enough to find me sites that were really interesting to me, I'd use it more often.

Content isn't the problem. Finding the content is still a problem, google-success aside. (Hey, I like google, but search engines don't fill the entire need...)

If anyone has recommendations for cool, regularly (daily) updated sites on the subject of technology, music, music technology, gadgets, meeting real nerd chicks online, and travel tips for Europe, I'd sure like to know them. :) Short of asking my friends and associates what their favourite daily-sites are, I don't know any other way to find the cool stuff ...

Re:Slashdot is a bad example.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Everyone else out there would rather watch paint dry

This is actually one of the strong points of the Internet! It is hard to find a working economic model for publishing or discussing matters that do not interest a very large audience, using traditional media such as newspapers or television. On the Internet however, that is radically different. Everyone can be a publisher, and there are places where the weirdest sort of things can be discussed.

The fact that a particular webboard or newsgroup on, say, migration patterns of the Canadian yellowtail finch, is of no interest whatsoever to all but a few Internet users, is not a failure of the Internet... the fact that the 2 or 3 people (probably from different countries) who are interested in this subject have a place to discuss it, makes it a success! I think that counting the number of people interested in a particular bit of Web content, makes an exceedingly poor measure of its quality. The Internet is an incredible rich source of information. Despite the fact that almost no one cares one bit about the yellowtail finch, there will be some information on it somewhere, should you ever need it. In that case... judge the quality of the information on its accuracy, not on the number of people it appeals to.

As a wise man once said

[Bertie]

The great thing about the Internet is that it means everybody can publish.

The worst thing about the Internet is that it means everybody can publish.