twopointouch

With all this talk of long tails and the empowerment of consumers, it’s easy to imagine that everyone is going to succeed. To satisfy my sceptical bent, I have consequently assembled a list of places and areas that I think we can safely assume will obey a Pareto curve, also called a power law. That means that 80% of the action goes to 20% of the players (i.e. not you or me). Well… maybe you.

1. Getting dugg. Getting onto the front page of digg can lift your traffic through the roof. My friend Marc from evolving trends was briefly the author of the number one site on wordpress.com, higher than “that scobleizer guy [his words and well worth quoting]“, thanks to a well-worded headline on a contentious topic. However, your chances of this happening are roughly 10% depending on (a) who dugg you (most important); (b) when; (c) your headline (maybe second-most important); and (d) the content (not important at all, IMHO, so long as it is about a hot topic). Duggtrends is the place to go to get all this information.

2. Google AdSense. If you don’t have 200,000 visitors a week then you will not earn enough money to support yourself, even if you have really excellent click-through ratios (say 5%). And you probably don’t. If you want the sort of income you might get doing something else, assuming you have a degree, double that number. You can check your CTR at any time on AdSense. If it’s one percent (more likely), then multiply the figures by five. If it’s 0.1% (most likely) then you need 1mn visitors a week to earn a decent living from AdSense. There are a lot of people on the web who will tell you different. Work out the maths for yourself is all I can say.

3. Leaders to also-rans. The famous Sacred Cow Dung list of Web 2.0 sites contains 44 social bookmarking sites. The list was published in March 2006, so I guess there are a few more by now. As the name implies, these social bookmarking sites – and the same is true of most Web 2.0 sites – add value by having lots of users. People will gravitate towards the services that offer the most value, won’t they? MySpace and deli.cio.us aren’t winning on their looks, eh?

4. Users to contributors. I need to increase the scales a little here. For web sites that take some effort to contribute or are very popular viewing, then roughly one percent contribute. (1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all Wikipedia articles, for example). This doesn’t matter in some environments – for example – if the contributors are getting paid. But a new, free, video sharing site that doesn’t pay and has no other USP … I think not.

5. Critics to actual producers. Yeah, that’s me in the 80% on this occasion. Sorry for this brief rant. As Tim said in my last entry, focusing on failure is pretty poor way way to go about things. Normal optimism and good feeling will be resumed shortly. Please get back to producing cool blogs, photos, videos and apps. I’m loving all of them.

See also: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality if you really want to be demotivated.