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  • Who puts what stuff online?
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What do we put online today? What sort of people put all those things online? Is there a pattern? And is there a way you can figure out whom to target with your web startup? (And how much money you need to make from each user?)

We began leaving a data trail online with email in the late 90s with Hotmail, all the way to actual videos with YouTube. Major landmarks were search history with Yahoo! and then Google, and profile information with Myspace (and then Orkut and FB).  Today we put not only text, but photos, music, video, maps online.

Kinds of online data

On a whim, I began to list the kinds of things we put online today, and began thinking of what sort of users put what sort of stuff online. I quickly realized the obvious - the most enthusiastic folks put the most kinds of data (not necessarily the most either in terms of volume or monetizable value) online.  So I grouped the kinds of things by who would most likely put them on the web. This is another way of looking at looking at the state of adoption of several web applications by the online population. Here is the grouping I made (Click on the picture for a larger image):

Skeptics/Laggards are the vast majority of Internet users - they use one email account to stay in touch with friends and relatives occasionally, browse and search the web, and that’s pretty much it.

The Mainstream have a MySpace/FB account, use chat clients, share photo albums and make the occasional Amazon purchase.

Early Adopters (in addition to the above) might write a blog and comment on other blogs, use Twitter, use an RSS Reader, and have an iTunes Music Store account.

And pushing the envelope are the Enthusiasts. They create rich digital content - videos on YouTube, perhaps streamed live or uploaded from a mobile device,  or create custom maps, or simultaneously work on documents with Zoho/Google Docs, or backup online with Amazon’s S3.

Thoughts on monetizing these groups

This grouping made me recall Adam Smith’s (of Xobni fame) post on User Bases and Pricing. I’d recommend you read it after this post. In a nutshell, the number of Laggards > Mainstream > Early Adopters > Enthusiasts. Therefore,  to reach a certain revenue figure (revenues = users x per-user-revenue), your product will need to have high per-user-revenues if it is in the rich content space whose creators (and consumers) are primarily enthusiasts - since their numbers are small [1]. On the other hand, firms like Google (search), Xobni (email), Soocial (contacts management) can live with tiny per-user-revenues.

What category do you think you fall in? Do you put some kind of data online that I haven’t included here?

[1] This is regardless of whether you make money by charging users themselves, or through other parties such as advertisers.