In the online community world there’s a well used heuristic that says how for every 100 members of a community, 1 will post unique content, 9 will comment on existing content, and 90 will be passive consumers.
As heuristics go, it has proved relatively durable, and there is a clear motivation for community owners to attract as many of the content creators as possible.
A recent study explores some of the motivations behind unique content creation, and may therefore help community managers in their quest.
They have identified five core motivators behind the creation of fresh content, whether that’s a blog post, a video, song or the numerous other types of online content. Those five factors are:
- entertainment
- self-expression
- social-belonging
- communication
- social-cognition
The five motivators were derived via the theory of uses and gratifications, together with the theory of reasoned action. These were used to better understand content creation and how we perceive such acts of creativity.
The authors suggest that the five motivators behind online content creation are similar to those found in those who passively consume content online. The difference primarily lies in the area of social-cognition.
This underlines our desire to share information or insights, voice our opinions online or participate in discussions.
“The findings of this study would help future studies to build a more comprehensive theoretical model, which will allow scholars to understand the factors influencing consumers’ creating behavior of social media content,” the team concludes.
To further muddy the waters, a study from earlier this year found that the easier we make it to create content online, the less likely people are to do so.
They use an analogy of a market, with creators of content making the investment in the hope that they will attract customers (or readers).
Unlike a business however, individual content creators often aren’t seeking financial reward but rather the status that comes from being heard.
The larger the social network, the greater the effort required to reach people, and the authors believe it doesn’t take a huge drop-off in the ‘reward’ they receive to see the effort taken to produce content as not worthwhile.
This increase in size tends to result in content that is less tailored, and therefore often less relevant to the receiver.
This then often sees creators deciding that the pay-off is no longer worthwhile, whilst potential creators can be put off by the size of the market. This, the researchers believe, explains why so much content is created by so few users.
