I was wondering about this when recently spending time on various sites with extensive user generated content. How absolutely true is the Pareto Principle when looking at such sites. It's quite clear that a small percentage (approx. 20% I would guess) generates over 80% of the content. The sites which spring to mind are Qype/Yelp (local reviews), TripAdvisor (travel and hotel reviews) and even Emporis (a building data related site in my portfolio). There are individuals (god bless em!) who provide so much content to these sites that it practically looks like they've made it their full time jobs. On Qype, where you get points for reviews as well as for the quality of your reviews, there are individuals who have hundreds of entries in comparison to the typical user who has a couple. Same goes for Tripadvisor. When looking at the community surrounding Emporis, you have individuals who in their spare time and on their own dime travel the world gathering information. This is absolutely necessary for the site and these top ranked providers of UGC are what makes these sites possible. At the same time, you often hear what these people's motivations for doing this are. There are the typical motivations such as ego, where you simply get to see your name at the top of a list or you have the most friends (this is more a Facebook or LinkedIn phenomenon). There may also be the boredom factor. I am sure many people simply make it a hobby to feed a site with content to pass time. There's also financial motivation as you can earn money by being the largest contributor on some sites. Yet I still wonder. Is there some other motivation which has these users spending disproportionate amounts of time entering content? If you know of any interesting studies regarding this please do let me know. I would find it interesting to delve into this a bit further especially in regards to sites focused more on business related social communities.
Update: Ayelet does a good job of partially answering my question and taking care of some of my homework.
Update: Ayelet does a good job of partially answering my question and taking care of some of my homework.
