And here comes the surprise: of all these active online publishers, only 250,000 make a living off publishing. That’s 0.1% of online publishers, and less than 1% of semi-professionals and professionals. In other words: in the Web 2.0, over 99% of mind and financial potential remains untapped. Ouch.   

 

We are not talking about a hypothetical situation in a distant future, in which people start doing things that they currently aren’t thinking of, i.e. assuming that all of the 1.4 billion internet users engage in in the production of content. No, we are talking about the people who are already, right now, investing a lot of time, effort and skill in online publishing. 30 million bloggers, video and music producers, visual artists and experts who publish online on an ongoing basis. Considering these numbers, the Web 2.0 is the world’s largest profit disaster. Never before in history have so many people engaged in producing media value and earned so little with it. Following this new perspective on the Web 2.0, the impressive content explosion we have witnessed can also be interpreted very differently: user-generated content technologies have brought down the average wage for content producers from $25+/hour to $0.25/hour.    The Web 2.0 is a technology that has diminished the return on content production by 99%.The reasons for the Web 2.0 disastrous profitability lies in the details of how user-generated content works today. Three factors – complexity of rich media publishing, obstacles in marketing and traffic generation, and a lack of monetization efficiency – lead to an extreme level of inefficiency for online publishers.          

The Web 2.0 has unleashed the greatest growth curve for human content production in history. At the same time, it has reduced the average hourly wage for creative publishers by 99%. This means two things: first, the Web 2.0 is on to something big. Its technologies and paradigms have proven to move the masses, and incur change on a grand scale.   

Second, its true potential will remain untapped unless we find a way to create more powerful incentives for everyone to engage in the production of high value content. Most likely, these incentives need to be monetary in nature in order to free world’s creative resources on a larger scale.  As long as the profit disaster of the Web 2.0 remains unsolved, the true content revolution cannot happen.