(2006-02-26) Yardley Yahoo Passive Pyramid

Greg Yardley criticizes the Framing in Bradley Horowitz's pyramid of Yahoo users - creators (Creative), synthesizers, readers (Passive Consumer-s). Once you start believing 90% of your audience is passive you can't help but shape your existing communities and design new ones with the passive consumers in mind. Talk all you want about making it easy to create - if you expect the bulk of your users to be passive gawkers your thinking's never going to stray from CPM Advertising space. How disappointing - since it is possible to design a service that demands creation, and such services are far stickier than ones built around showing ads to passive surfers. To compete, Yahoo's new services need 90% creators, not 1% or 10%.