Steve Rubel came back to blog just in time, showcasing this brilliant report from Forrester Research - Social Technographics. The graphic he highlights is incredibly revealing on its own:
The "creators" group are basically the Linkerati here. "Critics", "collectors", "spectators" and "joiners" also fit occassionaly into that profile, as they can be part of a content piece's viral movement across the web.
I actually take this research very positively - though 13% may seem like a small number, it's actually considerably higher than I would have suspected. A more participatory web means a sphere more apt to help great ideas and great content spread naturally.
What I'd love to see even more is the "creators" group broken down further into sub-sects like:
- Bloggers
- Web Publishers
- Journalists
- Multimedia Content Creators
- Forum Contributors (though this may fall under "joiners" or "critics" as well)
- Academic Publishers
- etc.
My other question would be watching trends over time - do more people become "creators" or "critics" or does the number stay relatively stable over time. I want to know if the MySpace generation will also become a generation of content generators, writers and linkers.
p.s. If you want to buy the report from Forrester, it's $279... Maybe we need to start charging more for the SEOmoz articles? 
UPDATE: As Shor pointed out, the researcher, Charlene Li, discusses the data in greater depth and offers review copies to bloggers here.
Kudos to Charlene Li for conducting this research. Rand (and other interested online marketers) you can get the report by emailing Charlene - details in her blog post here.
The results are different from the 1/10/100 (or 1/10/90) pyramid of content creation that people like Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo documented previously, especially, as Rand already noted, the proportion of 'creators'. I believe this number is much higher because it includes online consumers who are active once a month.
I don't know about you, but uploading one video a month or posting one blog a month doesn't sound very frequent at all - how many blogs or sites do you visit that only update once a month?
Anyhow, will need to read the rest of the report before making coming to any false conclusions :)
Excellent digging around :) I've added the link to the body of the post.
Shor, your informative response to this article really highlights a quality comment. You gave examples, you added value, and provided more insight into the subject of article.
The only thing that was bad about your comment was it's proximity to my comment (which did not give examples, did not add value, and did not provide more insight).
Thanks for highlighting my suckiness, I am going to request that your comments are at least two away from mine so in the future the contrast will not be so obvious :)
shor receives to +1 to ego boost.
Your comment did however remind me that there are firms that offer pay-per-comment services to boost perceived activity in forums/blogs.
That really is an interesting graphic, thanks for sharing it.
And, no. Don't charge more. :)
Lovin' the info, hatin' the presentation.
Am I the only one who thinks that it was a bad idea to use a ladder to represent the strata of social technographics? For one thing, ladders need evenly-spaced rungs, but those 6 strata aren't equal, so the overwhelming majority of "inactives" (52%) are accorded as much "rung space" as the minority of "creators" (13%). For another, I don't know if ordering the 6 strata that way is really helpful. It makes it seem as though "creators" are at the top of the social marketing food chain (er, ladder), but for all we know, "joiners" and "critics" may be more important to the health of that ecosystem.
I know, this is really pedantic, but I hope you'll agree that misuse of graphic representation of data is less helpful than just describing the data or putting it in tabular format.
I think there is another element that is missing, though it would be nearly impossible to really capture anyway...
let's not forget about the invisible linkerati or promoters, if you will. There are those who don't have sites or publish and perhaps don't even use social sites or tag pages, but are very keen to email or otherwise pass on info to others that brings visitors into a site.
Of course these people might be present in any one of these groups, and ideally I'm thinking of those who are more active than the average... you know that one person you expect to get an email from with some link to something or that person that you know will tell you about something they found online within the first 3 minutes of talking to them.
Targeting this group might be mostly made up of just creating great content to begin with, but I'm sure most sites neglect to try to connect with this group, focusing more on those that will provide measurable links or increase link popularity.
Not saying that this should bring a resurrgence of "Tell A Friend" forms, but maybe with the proper spam protection, this would be a great addition to your super-stupendous-better-than-sliced-bread new widget, along with just an encouraging request to spread the word and tell a friend.
This sector can be huge. Lots of email domains/subdomains in the referrers for one of my sites.
Thanks for the prod on the "tell a friend" forms. I need to get moving on that.
"I want to know if the MySpace generation will also become a generation of content generators, writers and linkers."
I think they will. I had friend who just graduated high school that showed me her blog a year ago. After browsing through the comments I noticed that of lot of her friends also had blogs. I was surpised, especially since almost none of my friends blog.
This is a great report and Chalene was kind enough to email me a copy which I've reviewed over here
There are number of good points in the comments above, including shur's one on what is categorised as frequent - once a month isn't really that much.
Despite that overall I have to say that I agree with Rand that it is a very heartening piece of research...
creators 13% means a lot of people. but you have to take into consideration "active creators", the ones that really and constantly create content. so the % is less than 13.
on the other hand you have to take into account that the study measures only us adult online consumers... so the % will rise again... even though i live in romania i feel close to you us mozzers :) ...
I was surprised to at the percentage of "Creators" out there, I thought it would be alot lower then that, maybe between 6 and 10%.
I think it would be interesting see the creators group be broken down as well. I think properly the most amount in that group would be 'forum contributors', but as you said they properly could fit into other groups as well.
Maybe if the report was a bit cheaper I would have a read, but 200 and something dollars, I think I would rather by a SEOmoz member - so don't up the prices! ;]
In all fairness, they probably had to pay a survey firm a ton of money to gather that data--hence the big, shiny price tag
I think there are more and more creators over the time. i believe almost all critics become creators some..
Looking at the top of the ladder with the content generators, i suspect this varys greatly depending on age.
I have read that over 50% of people under age 25 are generating their own content (even if its an infrequently updated myspace profile).
I wonder how long it takes to climb up the ladder?
I would assume that a "critic" today will become a "creator" tomorrow.
I also wonder what percentage of people climb the steps, and how high they go.