I am not as sanguine as you regarding the accuracy of our predictive powers.

If you haven’t read The Black Swan, I highly recommend it.

A lot of things look inevitable after the fact. Not to get to philosophical, but the way history is most often taught, at least to my mind, is imbued with false inevitability.

A lot of interesting work has been done in using bond prices as proxies for prediction (prediction markets, you may have heard the term).

From http://www.midasoracle.org/2007/04/23/black-swan-predicting-world-war-i/

…Ferguson is intrigued by the behavior of the financial markets on the eve of World War I because stock and bond prices at the time registered scant concern about the impending cataclysm. This contrasts with the conventional view among historians that the war was all but preordained because of a decade of escalating great-power rivalries that erupted into violence after the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian terrorist in June 1914

When Nassim Taleb spoke in New York last week he mentioned how, according to the analysis by Ferguson, war bonds did not anticipate WWI. Consistently, Taleb wrote in his reaction to a New York Times review of “Black Swan”: “(…) I gave a cohort-style exhaustive account of the four highest impact events in the history of the last two thousand years–the two great wars, and the rise of Christianity and Islam –and showed that they were unexpected based on contemporaneous accounts. If, as Niall Ferguson showed, war bonds did not forecast the great war, it was a Black Swan (…).”

We can predict prospectively, but we cannot predict when. Get used to an asynchronous clock. You can always decide that an even has arrived and act accordingly even if it hasn’t. That by itself mitigates the negative event.

In installed software, the transition to late market killed public companies. Growth from their initial product line is over at this point, so the investors bail out. It should be obvious when a company has consumed half of its market, but somehow no one measures this, so surprise they miss a quarter. Is it going to happen? Absolutely. When? Depends on how fast you are consuming your market.

@Sean Murphy

That is not mutually exclusive with what I am arguing. I picked a set of causes that I have heard people refer to often.

My sense is that they picked a format the looked OK for lower bandwidth than competitors had selected, they made it easier to contribute than existing competitors, and they could scale infrastructure successfully when they got their first few growth spurts. But these are my hypotheses and I wouldn’t promise you I could build another YouTube.

Sure, sounds reasonable to me. As much the causes I listed above sound right to me.

BTW Take a look at the video I linked to where one of the founders talk’s about the growth of YouTube. I don’t he makes any strong claims as to the causes of their spectacular growth.

What I don’t buy is how history has been “re-written” and now we indulge in retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.

As to your 2% seed, 15% comment, 83% watchers I have seen roughly similar figures for other communities:
1-4% original content
10-16% comment/rate/tag
80-90% lurk/read-only

There are certainly interactions/incentives to be monitored or managed between seeders and commenters/raters/taggers and even the decision to display views or other “lurker activity” is probably encouraging to both “seeders and commenters.”

Of course, that those sort of stats should be monitored and managed! But I think you have miss my point, namely, that those stats may be an indicator/measure of engagement, rather than a cause of engagement and/or growth. My point was that this individual was clearly using YouTube as a template to follow when they didn’t know if this was applicable or causal to success YouTube’s success:

We are open to “failing fast”, but not before we have seen real user activity and corresponding dropoff after that.

I heard interesting stats that in early YouTube days they found that only 2% people loaded videos, 15% commented and rest just watched.
So the 2% “seeders” is what we need to get at.”

Maybe this person should employ CustDev techniques to figure out why they have not seen any real user activity versus widening the funnel/increasing throughput and just blindly pushing to get 2% seeders?

Net net I think YouTube’s success was not the result of one or two key decisions or a flash of genius. I don’t think it was a Black Swan that we can’t learn from, but I freely acknowledge that understanding what happened and deriving some useful rules of thumb for other on-line communities is a very complicated undertaking.

Fair enough.

If there are some strong path dependencies or ‘winner take all’ effects at work then YouTube is not so much a Black Swan as inevitable in the that I believe a single large auction site (that happened to be Ebay) and a single large on-line bookstore (that happened to be Amazon) were.

But even in that situation the sites have undergone considerable evolution (many decisions, not just one or two lucky ones) and there is a lot of wisdom that can be gleaned from their current user interface and mechanism design.

I respectfully disagree, at least from my perspective it was the result of dozens if not thousands of decisions, not one or two lucky ones. I don’t know that I have puzzled them out but I think there are lessons there.

My sense is that they picked a format the looked OK for lower bandwidth than competitors had selected, they made it easier to contribute than existing competitors, and they could scale infrastructure successfully when they got their first few growth spurts. But these are my hypotheses and I wouldn’t promise you I could build another YouTube.

Also, where I think you could predict that auctions would be a “winner take all” kind of application/market-space because people selling goods want to have as many bidders as possible so they gravitate to the largest site, it’s not clear that there are “winner take all” properties to showing video.

As to your 2% seed, 15% comment, 83% watchers I have seen roughly similar figures for other communities:
1-4% original content
10-16% comment/rate/tag
80-90% lurk/read-only

There are certainly interactions/incentives to be monitored or managed between seeders and commenters/raters/taggers and even the decision to display views or other “lurker activity” is probably encouraging to both “seeders and commenters.”

Net net I think YouTube’s success was not the result of one or two key decisions or a flash of genius. I don’t think it was a Black Swan that we can’t learn from, but I freely acknowledge that understanding what happened and deriving some useful rules of thumb for other on-line communities is a very complicated undertaking.

@Sean Murphy

Completely understood. I am not terribly happy with the way this post turned out.

What are the top three to five lessons learned that you take away from YouTube?

I don’t know. Are there any? My point is that we are better off admitting we don’t know than pretending to know and applying made-up “lessons” to our own startups. Sometimes the lesson is that there are no lessons.

Can we even learn what actually happened?

IMHO, I think if any of us knew the actual cause of their growth and whether or not it was easily replicable, our present net worth would be a lot greater.

The reason I used YouTube as an example is that they had witnessed insane growth and people drew what I think were the wrong “lessons”. For example, from a comment on the LSC Group:

“we are struggling with the same issue on lead/buzz generation.

I heard interesting stats that in early YouTube days they found that only 2% people loaded videos, 15% commented and rest just watched.
So the 2% “seeders” is what we need to get at.”

Really? Even if that is true, is it causal/relevant? And how did this person come up with this “strategy” — IMHO, by looking at a Black Swan and making up a story that seemed to make sense.

Does that help?

http://emergentfool.com/2008/10/31/what-im-working-on-supercharging-innovation/