The 1% Rule will change

by asi

100000000 (one hundred million) daily downloads on YouTube and 65000 uploads. That, as Anthony  kindly calculated is 1,538 downloads per upload. According To Yahoo!’s nice guy for every 1 creator we have 10 synthesizers, or active participants and 100 consumers. But than we have to realise that increasingly consumption is production – we don’t just passively view or downloads (well, some of us do…) but we also rate, tag, review, comment and this is all part of that living web, an everlasting meaning-making machine.

The Guardian’s conclusion is somewhat skeptical:

"So what’s the conclusion? Only that you shouldn’t expect too much online. Certainly, to echo Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. The trouble, as in real life, is finding the builders".

This might be currently true but not for long. The current 1% are those early adaptors, geeks and tireless creatives that were quick to realised the merits of playful creativity and 15min of glory. Yet as the social web matures, armies of teenagers that grew up on myspace and YouTube are taking notes and educate themselves in imovie and photoshop. As technology for creation will get cheaper and mainstream, i suspect we’ll see the 1% rule changes and mass creativity will flourish.