Yepic, Wikipedia, and the Bloggosphere

Do you use Wikipedia? Do you read blogs?

Let's compare those two:

Wikipedia currently has 1.4MM articles in English alone and, per Alexa, is the 9th most popular website in the world.

Given that 6 of the sites that are more popular are either search engines or social networks, Wikipedia is actually 2nd only to You-Tube as the most popular content-based website in the world. I would guess that more than 50 percent of the time I'm searching Google, I end up at Wikipedia. And you're probably familiar with scientific studies that have been done showing Wikipedia to be as accurate as Encylopedia Brittanica.

This is truly astonishing given the fact that two years ago no one even knew Wikipedia existed. Look at the graph below that shows how Wikipedia (the blue line) has quietly exploded and overtaken sites like eBay, Amazon, and About.com.


The marvel of Wikipedia only expands when you discover how many employees the company has. 10. That's right. Just 10.

So who's writing all this amazing content? Perhaps you, like me, understood that Wikipedia was authored by volunteers. The basic premise of their "wiki" software is that everyone can create new content and everyone can edit everyone else's content. The millions of articles that have sprung up in dozens of languages created for me a vision of hundreds of thousands--perhaps even millions--of authors all working in this kind of controlled chaos that was producing these golden nuggets of information.

But this is not the case. The Wikipedia author community is surprisingly small. Spend 10 minutes reviewing these charts and you'll discover the following:

• There are less than 200,000 people who have ever edited Wikipedia 10 times or more.
• There are less than 50,000 people who edit Wikipedia 5 times a month.
• There are less than 5,000 people who edit Wikipedia 100 times a month (which is about 3 times a day).

Take a minute to think about this. From my vantage point, the people who are editing 100 times a month are really the stewards of Wikipedia. They are the ones who've created most of the content, done most of the research, refined most of the offering. The other contributors no doubt impact the overall offering of Wikipedia, but it's this core group of less than 5,000 that have really given us the tremendous website we all use today.

It's a testament to just how much value a focused group of people can create. And they did it all for free.

Now let's take a look at another group that's also producing tons of content: Bloggers.

Technorati.com is a service that tracks and ranks blogs. Today they're tracking 102.8 million blogs. 18 months ago they were tracking 34 million. Take a look at this chart from April 2006. I've had a hard time finding something more current.


34 million blogs 18 months ago. 108 million blogs today. And Technorati says the bloggosphere is going to just keep on growing. Many are already talking about the day when there are more than 1 billion blogs.

Pew Internet published a report a year ago analyzing all this blog activity in the United States. Of 12 million American bloggers at the time (undoubtedly many more now), fully 68 percent said they blogged to share practical skills and knowledge with other people. 2 million of them said they wanted to find a way to make money with their content.

Technorati ranks the blogs in the bloggosphere, and one of the more interesting lists they publish is the Technorati 100, which chronicles the top 100 most popular blogs on the Internet.

Just for kicks, I thought I'd compare the top 4 blogs to Wikipedia in terms of traffic and popularity.


Just a couple of years ago, Wikipedia was generating similar traffic to some of these blogs. Since then things have changed quite a bit.

The Bloggosphere is also getting quite a bit of criticism in the press. A prominent journalist recently posed a compelling question about blogs: "What if what we're doing here is creating a ghetto of cheap content?"

So . . . Wikipedia becomes one of the world's most popular, beloved, and trusted websites in a couple of years with just a few thousand volunteers and 10 full-time employees, while the bloggosphere--with tens of millions of contributors and over 100 million blogs--has become a bloated stack of hay within which people struggle to find the occasional needle.

What accounts for this gigantic disparity? Surely the 5000 or so Wikipedians creating most of the content aren't smarter than everyone in the Bloggosphere. Surely they don't have more collective time. And surely the bloggers in the Bloggosphere don't have less of an interest in sharing what they know, contributing their time, etc.

I think the disparity is primarily a function of synergy (or lack thereof, in the case of bloggers).

Steven Covey talks about synergy in his book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." He calls it a law of nature: when plants are planted next to one another, their roots co-mingle to improve the quality of the soil; draft horses can individually pull 10,000 or so lbs., but if you put two of them together they can pull 40,000 lbs. or more. When it comes to synergy, the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. 2+2 doesn't equal 4, it equals 5 or more.

Wikipedia's 5,000 users have come together organically (they found one another, invited one another into the site and thereby grew the community one person at a time) and become one of the most inspiring examples of synergy that we have in modern history.

The Bloggosphere is just the opposite. Millions and millions of individuals all fighting for attention, trying desperately to shout louder than everyone else.

The one produces the world's best content-based website. The other produces a "ghetto of cheap content."

So . . . what does this have to do with Yepic?

Wikipedia does very well when it comes to the type of information you'd look for in an encyclopedia. It does NOT do well when it comes to practical types of knowledge with a "How-To" flavor.

Interestingly, many blogs attempt to create this kind of "How To" content on every conceivable subject. But the content they create just isn't up to par with the expectations of those who search Google every day, looking for specific information on subject X or Y.

Why is this? There are probably many reasons, but I ultimately believe the problem with this type of content on the web today is rooted in a lack of good old fashioned capitalism. I created Yepic to address this problem.

I've written about this quite a bit in previous posts, and I'll write more in the future. But the short of it goes like this:

If I want to know about changing oil leaks on my 1996 Jaguar XJS (which I got for a steal on a local lot here in Utah), who's going to do a better job producing that info for me? Someone writing about it recreationally on a Thursday night, mainly as a hobby, or someone who's competing for my money in a system that clearly illustrates how much other authors and consumers value his content?

I'm convinced it's the latter. And if you are, too, then I hope you'll join the Yepic community, work with other Yepic authors, and help us create the web's next great offering: Yepic.com . . . the site people turn to first when they need any kind of practical how-to content on the web.

Getting Started on Yepic

I've created a Yepic article that helps you get started on the site. I've set it up for open collaboration, so please feel free to jump in and add content, make improvements, etc. Come on over and take a look!

Why Paying For Information Makes Sense

I think we might rename the Synopsis field of the article summary page to something like "Why Buying My Article is Better Than Searching for this Information."

We've been on a fund raising tour for the last couple of weeks and at a recent meeting with some angel investors, one guy fired up Google and asked us "Why would I pay for content when I can find several million hits on any given topic for free?"

That's a great question, one I think every Yepic author should think through thoroughly before pricing an article. I know there's value in UGC . . . I often discover more value in UGC than content I regularly and happily pay for. And a fresh new batch of market research from eBay confirms that people are buying UGC by the millions each month. But that doesn't mean it's easy to be a UGC entrepreneur. It would be a mistake to interpret the eBay data as evidence that it's simple to sell people your thoughts on a subject. People will need some convincing before they'll be willing to plunk down any money at all for some content, much less content they think they might be able to get free elsewhere.

What follows are my suggestions on how to answer this question.

Why Buying My Article is Better Than Searching for This Information

First, I think every Yepic article should be fully aware of and incorporate as much as possible of what I call the G20, which stands for the Google 20. What can you find on Google after conducting 20 minutes of search on your chosen topic? Generally speaking, if the jist of what you've written is readily available with search, you shouldn't be posting it on Yepic. You need to provide much more than that. I think it's a great idea to begin your article with a summary of what you found doing 20 minutes of Google search. Or 2 hours. The more you can convince your prospect that they're not going to quickly find what you've written anywhere else, the better a shot you have at getting them to buy.

The G20 is also a useful exercise in that it gives you some insight into the major trends that exist within your topic. I researched Thanksgiving for a few hours, for example, and found that almost everything in the first 3 pages of Google results had to do with Thanksgiving history, recipes and other food how-to, and/or arts and crafts. If I were to create a "Best of the Web" Yepic article on Thanksgiving, one that collated all of the best recipes and how-to (including instructional videos and podcasts), the best historical data, and the best arts and crafts for the season, and if I were to pitch my prospect on the fact that spending $2 on my article would be much more productive than spending 3 hours Googling (something I've already done for them), particularly if they're looking for info on any one of the 3 big trends . . . now we're starting to approach content someone will pay for. Considering the fact that "Thanksgiving" was the most searched-for term on Google (source: Zeitgeist) for the two weeks preceding the holiday, such an article might have done very well. I've always thought one of the best Yepic applications would be a series of articles that incorporates the Best of the Web for any of Google's Zeitgeist topics.

On a more theoretical note, I'd like to speak more directly to that investor's question:

A search for "How to" on eBay reveals thousands and thousands of UGC titles selling for under $10. Subjects range from "how to mix water colors" to "how to tame a wild boar." We have a friend who's wife used to sell baby bracelets on eBay and had a pretty loyal following, and her consumers quickly snatched up a 4-page "How to make a baby-bracelet" PDF she put together for the do-it-yourself crowd. And recent research we've conducted using eBay's new Marketplace Research tool shows that millions of dollars worth of these types of articles sell every month. There are several other sites where people can sell PDFs and eBooks, too. These models aren't new. Many of them sprung up when the Internet first became popular, and this content sells in spite of the fact that there is free information on the topic that's readily available with a little searching elbow-grease. They're full of pain for both buyers and sellers--a pain we're seeking address with Yepic--but they do constitute proof positive that there is existing demand and supply for paid UGC.
So why do people pay?
I've addressed this in another post, but the short answer is I think most of the free information on the web that I'm really interested in was crafted for a different purpose than satisfying my need for information. That purpose? The author's recreation. Most people contribute to the web recreationally. It's fun to do on a Thursday night when you have a couple of hours. This ultimately means that any overlap between their need for recreation and my need for information is most likely accidental. Hence the web is filling up faster than ever before--more than 12,000 new blogs per minute--and yet I still struggle to find out the best way to take a Western Carribean cruise.

Why is this recreational model the most prevalent one on the Internet today? Well, is sure isn't because people aren't interested in making money. Pew Internet's recent survey on bloggers showed that fully 2 million of them are interested in finding new ways to monetize their content. We think the reason recreational models are creating more content than paid models is simply because there hasn't been a marketplace suited to the creation, sale, and distribution of true Web 2.0 content. That's something we're seeking to remedy with Yepic.

The Pains of Creating and Selling Digital Content Today

eBay users are already buying and selling copious amounts of user-generated content. But consider the pain of this experience:
We developed this table to give us a framework for thinking about the problems we're really solving with Yepic. What do you think? Is there something missing?

Web 2.0 and the Changing Face of Digital Content

Someone recently asked me to define the term Web 2.0.

For starters, I really like Tim O'Reilly's definition of the term. Wikipedia's page is also good. Both note how Web 2.0 is less about something new and more about the fuller realization of the web's true potential. This realization, contents O'Reilly, gravitates around several core themes: Specifically:

1. The Web as platform.
2. Harnessing collective intelligence
3. Data is the next Intel Inside
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models

I should write a post on how Yepic is, in each of these respects, a Web 2.0 company. But in this post I want to focus on what O'Reilly calls "data" and what we call "digital content." To better illustrate, let me quote O'Reilly's article:

"Contrast, however, the position of Amazon.com. Like competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, its original database came from ISBN registry provider R.R. Bowker. But unlike MapQuest, Amazon relentlessly enhanced the data, adding publisher-supplied data such as cover images, table of contents, index, and sample material. Even more importantly, they harnessed their users to annotate the data, such that after ten years, Amazon, not Bowker, is the primary source for bibliographic data on books, a reference source for scholars and librarians as well as consumers. Amazon also introduced their own proprietary identifier, the ASIN, which corresponds to the ISBN where one is present, and creates an equivalent namespace for products without one. Effectively, Amazon "embraced and extended" their data suppliers."

O'Reilly's primary argument here is that no company can create sustainable competitive advantage out of commoditized data. MapQuest became irrelevant because they leased and resold data that other businesses (Google Maps, for example) could also lease and resell. Amazon, on the other hand, has become an unquestioned authority in publishing because they took the ubiquitous ISBN registry and extended it with tons of user-contributed data.

O'Reilly's argument focuses on businesses that operate individual web-sites, but I think there's a parallel line of thought here that applies to individual purveyors of digital content (like people who compose and sell their own copyrighted content), as well. In Web 1.0 days, the content you created was fundamentally limited in terms of openness, richness, and accessibility. In terms of openness, it was very difficult to collaborate with others, and this meant your content couldn't benefit from the collective intelligence that's become a hallmark of Web 2.0. In terms of richness, you could have text and grapics, or video and audio, but it was difficult to easily incorporate all of those into one piece of content. In terms of accessibility, Web 1.0 content was anything but. You had to download, install additional software, email, burn to CD, or print, and then you had to deal with all the version issues that came with those distribution and consumption models. If the author made a change to the content, it was very difficult to get it to all the consumers.

Web 2.0 content has improved dramatically in each of these regards:

Openness: Whereas Web 1.0 content was fundamentally closed, Web 2.0 information is fundamentally open . . . to collaboration, contribution, review, updates, etc.

Richness: Whereas Web 1.0 content was fundamentally flat and lacked integration across different types of media, Web 2.0 content is fundamentally rich and seamlessly integrates text, graphics, images, video, audio, widgits, etc.

Accessibility: Whereas Web 1.0 content was difficult to access, particularly in update scenarios, Web 2.0 content is always current and just one click away.

In the same way that business models that rely on commoditized data find themselves under enormous competitive pressure that pushes them into a state of irrelevance, content entrepreneurs that fail to embrace these new content characteristics will also find themselves, and their content, fading into oblivion. Closed, flat, inaccessible content is a dying breed.

With that in mind, we created Yepic not just a platform for for-profit self-publication, but as a platform for for-profit self-publication of true Web 2.0 content.

Missionaries, Recreators, and Capitalists

We've spent some time thinking about who creates UGC on the web, and we've come up with the following 3 categorizations:

1. Missionaries. These are the very, very active UGC contributors who write for the sake of benefiting humanity. Their content shows up in blogs, Q&A sites, and wikis. Wikipedia has largely been a success due to approximately 2000 very, very active Wikipedians who've worked night and day to pull together the vast majority of the 1.4M articles we enjoy every day. They do it without pay, and they would probably find the idea of getting paid for their work kind of repugnant. These folks are wonderful, remarkable, and they create terrific content. We are the grateful recipients of their terrific work.

There's only two problems with this group: (1) There aren't enough of them. Missionaries have always been a distinct minority, and their work, while terrific, tends to be limited by the small numbers in their ranks. (2) They can only work on things they believe in. Writing textbooks for children in 3rd-world countries? Sure! Helping you figure out which vacation package is better? Don't count on it.

2. Recreators. The recreators write, well, recreationally. In our opinion, these folks constitute the majority of the writers creating more than 12,000 new blogs per minute (and growing), or answering most of the 160M questions that have showed up in Yahoo Answers over the last year. They find value in community or sharing practical know-how, but more than anything they find writing and interacting with others fun, relaxing, stimulating, etc. Blogs, forums, Q&A sites, and hang-out sites like Helium and Gather are all outlets that they enjoy using for a couple of hours per day or week.

These folks create terrific amounts of content on just about every subject, and it's fun to browse through their stuff. But there's a problem with this group, too. Their content creation is almost entirely untethered from any quantifiable demand. It's almost all push, no pull. It's more about their creative outlet than your need for information. This means that while it's likely that there are folks writing about the topic you're interested in on the web, it's not necessarily likely that they're addressing your particular questions.

The web's content has become so "push" oriented that we all find ourselves combing through information that wasn't designed for us--or for anyone else, really . . . it's usually created to give the author a creative, recreational outlet most of the time--trying to find the bits and pieces we really want and need. This is now the norm.

3. The Capitalists. These are folks that want our money. And, as usual, they'll provide a better product for it, too. Why? Because in free markets, they have to compete against other folks who want our money too, and that competition is always a good thing for the consumer. Interestingly, the web hasn't catered well to date to information capitalists. They have to use eBay or kludgy PDF or eBook downloads to sell their stuff.

Yepic has been designed to give the capitalists a place to create and hawk their digital wares in an open market.