The reigning currency of the internet is attention. Bands posting free songs on MySpace, bloggers churning out a steady stream of screeds, and teenagers pouring their hearts out to their webcams on YouTube all crave attention from their peers or the wider internet community. Yet as critical as this dynamic is to today’s web, I’m aware of almost no research which quantifies its inner workings. So I found this recent paper from HP’s Social Computing Lab very interesting: Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity.

In the paper, Bernardo Huberman and his co-authors set out to measure how the popularity of someone’s web content influences their decision to produce further content. The researchers used a dataset of users who had contributed videos to YouTube. Their first insight is that user contributions are “bursty” — on average, users posted nothing in 66% of the two-week time periods the calendar was sliced into. More importantly, there was strong evidence that attention, in the form of video views, encourages users to produce more videos. The more attention a user’s videos received in one period, the more likely they more to upload more video in the next (see the paper for a full description of the linear regression model used). On the flip side, users who stopped uploading content tended to do so after a steady decline in the views they received.

How does this relate to strategy? Let’s say that YouTube could choose between two scenarios: 500 user-contributed videos with 100,000 views each, or 5,000 videos with 10,000 views each. Which would they prefer? Both scenarios deliver 50 million pageviews, roughly what the site currently gets per month. In the first scenario, only 500 users are receiving the attention that will encourage them to continue creating content, while in the latter that number is ten times higher. The latter, larger pool of users will be the engine of growth, creating more content and adding value to the site.

This isn’t just a thought experiment. Websites have powerful user experience levers with which to influence the shape of their communities. YouTube’s home page could be a simple list of the top 10 most-watched videos this month, reinforcing those videos already popular and creating a site with a few “blockbusters” and a great many more videos languishing in obscurity. Alternatively, the home page could list 10 videos being watched right now, a few videos selected at random, and maybe a selection of videos whose popularity is rising quickly or already strong among a given subset of the community. This would be a more egalitarian YouTube, where niche content had a greater chance to find its audience and grow in popularity.

This flatter, more egalitarian YouTube strategy finds support in the economics of web audiences as well. Niche audiences, though small, are worth more per capita to advertisers than the monolithic audiences of mass media because their interests are more specific and can be matched more precisely to relevant advertising. (Online advertising wonks: feel free to push back on this argument.) The ad buying world may not have fully adapted to this view yet, but a YouTube comprised of thousands of micro-communities has significantly more value than one with a single undifferentiated audience. The Social Computing Lab‘s research provides quantitative support necessary to cultivate these communities.