We show through an analysis of a massive data set from YouTube that the productivity exhibited in crowdsourcing exhibits a strong positive dependence on attention, measured by the number of downloads. Conversely, a lack of attention leads to a decrease in the number of videos uploaded and the consequent drop in productivity, which in many cases asymptotes to no uploads whatsoever. Moreover, short-term contributors compare their performance to the average contributor’s performance while long-term contributors compare it to their own media.
N. Anderson , The YouTube effect: HTTP traffic now eclipses P2P, Argentina Mulls Open Source Move (2007). Available at: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070619-the-youtube-effect-http-traffic-now-eclipses-p2p.html (accessed 4 August 2009).
2.
G. Hardin , The tragedy of the Commons, Science162 (1968) 1243-1248.
3.
E. Adar and B.A. Huberman, Free riding on Gnutella, First Monday5(10) (2000).
4.
A. Asvanund , K. Clay, R. Krishnan and D. Smith, An empirical analysis of network externalities in peer-to-peer music-sharing networks, Information Systems Research15(2) (2004) 155-174.
5.
D. Hughes , G. Coulson and J. Walkerdine, Free riding on Gnutella revisited: The bell tolls, IEEE Distributed Systems Online6(6) (2005).
6.
N. Glance and B.A. Huberman, Dynamics of social dilemmas , Scientific American270(3) (1994) 76-81.
7.
S.S. Levine and S. Shah, Cultivating the digital commons: A framework for collective open innovation , paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association 2004. Available at: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p108966_index.html (accessed 4 August 2009).
8.
B.A. Huberman , C. Loch and A. Onculer, Status as a valued resource, Social Psychology Quarterly67(1) (2004) 103-114.
9.
G. Franck , Science communication, a vanity fair, Science286 (1999) 53-55.
10.
J. Lampel and A. Bhalla, The role of status seeking in online communities: Giving the gift of experience, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication12(2) (2007) 435-455.
11.
A. Mockus , R.T. Fielding and J.D. Herbsleb, Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology11(3) (2002) 309-346.
12.
E.S. Raymond , Homesteading the Noosphere, The Cathedral & the Bazaar (O’Reilly, Sebastopol, CA, 1999).
13.
G. Szabo and B.A. Huberman, Predicting the popularity of online content, to appear in Communications of the ACM 2009. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.0405 (accessed 4 August 2009).
14.
J.O. Street , R.J. Carroll and D. Ruppert, A note on computing robust regression estimates via iteratively reweighted least squared, The American Statistician42(1) (1988) 152-154.
15.
D. Wilkinson , Strong regularities in online peer production , Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic Commerce, Chicago, IL, 2008 ( ACM, New York, 2008) 302-309
16.
C.W.J. Granger , Investigating causal relations by econometric models and cross-spectral methods, Econometrica37 (1969) 424-438.
