A Reuters article entitled “Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak” takes the cake for the most ridiculous reporting I have seen today. The author takes statistics such as “…0.16 percent of visits to Google’s top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch…” and “…two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr … are to upload new photos…” to mean that participation is weak. This is ridiculous for two obvious reasons.

1) By the author’s standards, viewing of web content, and leaving comments are not “participation”, and a site on which 100% of the visits were to upload content, and 0% of the visits were to view it or comment on it would have very high participation.

2) YouTube and Flickr have massive amounts of traffic, so a small percentage of that number amounts to a very large amount of content being uploaded. These are incredibly strong communities that many Web 2.0 sites aspire to be like.

It’s obvious the author’s intent is to say that the ratio of content producers to content consumers is small, but these types of numbers reflect the intent of media distribution since cavemen drew on walls; valuable content, produced by a small number of people, for consumption by a much larger group of people. This is what makes good content with great production values so valuable; it is highly leverageable.

To infer that “participation” is weak because of this small ratio is incorrect, and makes for an inaccurate view of the power of Web 2.0 sites.