Yahoo’s Social Media Pyramid: Big oops?

Recently Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo published a pyramid model of social media that generated a lot of comments. (see his blog Elatable) Essentially it’s a classic pyramid with creative production and participation descending from the apex – as the peak is the most creative/productive of content, followed by tiers of lesser ‘productivity’ and participation, until you arrive at the base which is passive and just ‘consumes’ the content created or manipulated (content that has been ‘participated’?) from above. Seem sort of common sense (”for every one creator there’s ten synthesizers and one hundred consumers” and that big broad base looks nice and stable!).

Anyways – here is a nice counter argument (Yahoo’s counterproductive pyramid) from Greg Yardley’s yardley.ca blog.
“It’s telling that the social media Yahoo’s bought doesn’t fit Horowitz’s own pyramid – del.icio.us and Flickr don’t demand that participants create, but they’re designed to encourage creation at rates far higher than one in one hundred or even one in ten. There’s no huge body of del.icio.us users out there that browse around the service but don’t have accounts – if you ‘get’ del.icio.us you’ll create an account and add bookmarks. Flickr browsers are also disproportionately Flickr account holders and Flickr community contributors, compared to the users of bigger services – otherwise, what’s the point?”

Lots of good stuff to read in both the post and in the comments.