The Wisdom of Crowds? Nay!

It's the wisdom of a few exceptional people. I think I need to delve into the mathematics of user-generated content (UGC)...

There is a buzz about the "wisdom of crowds", everyone seems to cite Wikipedia and digg as examples of crowd of people collaborating to produce high quality sources of information. The fact of the matter is that most of the content on sites relying UGC is created by a small minority. Jimbo Wales has said on many occasions (including in this month's Business 2.0 magazine) that 50% of Wikipedia was written by a 1000 people. This is in direct opposition to the commonly held belief that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written by millions of people, each adding a small snippet or factoid of information. digg also has similar statistics. Very similar, in fact. seomoz.org pointed out that 56% of digg's front page was contributed by the top 100 diggers.

Let's dig deeper into the numbers of these two prime examples of websites that depend on UGC. Based on some rough alexa analysis, and commonly accepted figures, Wikipedia gets in the range of 10 million unique visitors per day, while digg gets in the range of 1 million. Either way, the approximate ratio is that Wikipedia has 10X the traffic of digg. This is the exact same ratio as with the core contributors. Does your site's readership directly relate to the number of core contributors?

Website	readership	contributors	% of content	readers / contributor
wikipedia.org	10,000,000	1,000	50%	10,000
digg	1,000,000	100	50%	10,000

If instead of focusing on the size of your crowd, you focus on your core contributors, the content of these users can support 10,000 (mostly non-contributing) readers. How does this happen? I believe that it's the exceptional intelligence and wisdom of the passionate that is able support strong readerships. (Not the mediocre intelligence, and wisdom of crowds)

How does the trend of crowdsourcing fit in to this model? Well, crowdsourcing involves paying (often very small amounts of money) for the content produced by crowds of people. This model does not likely lead to exceptional content by passionate people, but rather acceptable content by people motivated largely by money. This type of content, I believe, does not support the readership ratios seen in Wikipedia and digg, and you can verify this by visiting some sites that are known to crowdsource (without mentioning any names).

I put it out to you, that instead of budgetting for crowdsourcing, your money would be better spent catering to your 1% of passionate users. How do you that? This blog is a good start....