I guess what I was saying before is, if there’s 1 active contributor, 1 passive contributor, and 98 passive blackholes, if the 98 blackholes went away, as either the remaining 1 active or passive contributor, I know that if I contribute into the system, only 1 other person will be able to enjoy my contribution, where previously there was 99. Thus, since not many people would see what I post anyway, I might stop posting :/

I’m thinking of my Flickr experience. For the longest time I just posted my photos on Flickr, free-loading. Then came the period where I just started taking more photos of more events, I wanted to share more of my daily life (e.g. to the folks back in .my), and suddenly the free account’s 100MB xfer quota was in my way. After hitting it a few times, I paid up – and I’ve been a Flickr paid user for a few years.

I feel like this is a more positive way to convert users, since they understand that in order to get the positive incentive, they have to pay up. Just to contrast that with bombarding them with so much ads, that they have to pay up, just to make the negative deterrent go away.

I guess it’s just a preference; I know there are plenty of business online that do the “pay us to make the annoyance go away” thing, and it appears to be working for them.

Using Flickr’s positive-incentive idea, I wonder if Digg has thought of coming with a system like for instance, if you are a blackhole consumer, you can view the top most popular post, but only from the 2 page and later – so, if you want to see the first page there the juiciest content are, you either have to pay, or start to contribute passively. Even for the extremely broke and can’t afford paying, this would mean that you’d have to start passively contributing, .. and this would be good for everybody on the whole platform.

I’d imagine that Digg’s 1st page of top most popular posts probably follow a 80/20 “interestingness” rule, so being able to access 80% of the total best content on the web on the first page is a real incentive, even for the freeloaders to stop being lazy

Cheers!

Good question. Let me put more clarity of the difference between “Passive Contributing” vs. “Passive Blackhole”.

I define “Passive Contributing” as folks who mostly consume content on your website but they do provide some value in the form of comments, re-share, voting etc. Hence their presence has value to other users on the website.

“Passive Blackhole” users are folks who do *not* provide any value to you or to other users. These folks do not contribute comments, or re-share your content to other people, or rate the content to help others etc. In other words, if you were a user on my website, you would not even notice these “Blackhole” users at all. While they consume, they have no presence.

For these folks, especially if they do not click on any ads, all you’re doing is serving content to them but you’re not getting anything back in return. I propose that you might as well charge a fee to these folks because if they leave, your serving cost goes down and it improves your bottom line and also provide a better performance experience for the others.

The way I look at a content-oriented site like Digg is this.

The guys who do all the discovery and sharing of content into Digg, you do everything you can to make them happy. Don’t charge them for anything.

The guys who don’t really share but come to Digg to consume the content only, you show them ads to monetize on them. And you *only* charge for specific “premium” services if the consumption or non-consumption of these services do not detract from the user enjoying the free services. In other words, the free services must have enough merit and value that even if I don’t pay for premium, I will still come back just as often.

Next I would split this group further into two.

For the folks who actually increase the “value” of the site, by contributing comments, or re-share or voting, they’re good. Show them just enough ads that it does not detract from the overall user experience.

But for the folks who consume and do nothing but consume only, show them way more ads than normal. It will affect their user experience somewhat but hey, you need to recoup your operating cost. If they leave, you don’t loose. If they stay, the increase ad exposure *may* improve your revenue. I’m saying *may* because there is ad fatigue after a certain point.

Hope this helps.

Colin

Just a thought – but another question I would ask is, “in absence of the passive blackhole users, would my active users and passive contributing users go away?”

I myself am somewhere between a passive contributing and passive blackhole; occasionally posting/sharing new content, but if I knew that passive blackhole users were completely decimated (e.g. by a subscription fee?) – that’s a real bummer and that’s less of an incentive for me to contribute or interact.

I guess what I’m saying is, maybe the active and passive-contributing are there only because the 99% passive blackholes are there – so the blackholes might be a necessary cost, even if one is not able to monetize them at all.

Cheers!