Participants vs Passive Users: A Radiohead Case Study
Interesting post over at Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog about how your project can still be a raging success when only 1 - 0.1% of your audience participate in your content in the way you’ve set out for them to - because the number of people the internet makes potentially accessable is so vast. He cites Wikipedia and You Tube as good examples of this - the latter being where only 0.1% of users upload videos and yet obviously this being more than enough to make You Tube the commodity that it is.
It brings to mind something I’ve been brooding on for a while now relating to the stats for Radiohead’s remix competition for their single ‘Nude’. When they launched their follow-up remix competition for ‘Reckoner’ they supplied these numbers (of user interactivity levels) in their newsletter for how the previous competition had gone:
- Unique visitors: 6,193,776
- Number of mixes: 2,252
- Number of votes: 461,090
- Number of track listens: 1,745,304
These numbers roughly translate as:
- 0.04% of individuals entered their own remixes (4 in every 10,000 people)
- 7.4% voted on their favorites tracks (740 people in 10,000) and
- 28.2% (2820 in 10,000) listened to those tracks.
Moreover, about 35% did something. 65% did nothing other than check out the site. And yet Radiohead happily described these stats as a huge success for their competition.
Tags: audience, community, participants, passive users, Radiohead, success measurements, users
