The top face is the one you get when you first create a profile on Flickr. The bottom face is the one you get when you first create a profile on 43Things. Which is better?
Each site gives you tools to express yourself and your creativity, and one of the first tools you see is your profile picture. The default Flickr profile picture (top) looks much more blank and expressionless. The default for 43Things (bottom) is more perky and happy (and the Yahoo Answers default is even moreso, though they seem to have stock cartoon faces you can use, too). I immediately wanted to replace the default on Flickr — who wants to be that drab? — but I’m less motivated to find a replacement on 43Things. Does making the default undesirable make people more motivated to personalize their profile?
I chose a completely random goal from the 43Things home page: “download episodes of ‘Lost’.” Then I looked through the list of 539 people who are interested in that goal. Of those 539, just 9 of them (about 2%) had changed the default profile picture to a personalized picture. On the analogous Flickr group, “LOST – the series,” I looked through the list of 128 group members, and found that 120 of them (about 94%) had replaced the default profile picture with a personalized picture.
Very scientific, I know! Someone get my lab coat. Of course, Flickr is all about pictures, so presumably its users have a personal picture more readily at hand. But, the results are awfully striking, and they tend to make me think that the completely expressionless Flickr default is a call to action, and an effective one.
Anyone from Flickr or 43Things want to contribute the actual percentage of user accounts that have personalized profile pictures? How about from an IM network, Yahoo Answers, or other examples?
Update: Here’s the default face from last.fm, which Mike suggested in the comments as a better comparator:
In the last.fm Lost group (that turned out to be a fortuitous choice), 117 of 122 members (about 96%) have changed the default profile picture to a personalized picture.
Update 2: Erik Benson from Robot Co-op, makers of 43Things, says in the comments that on that site, “20% of people with at least one goal have profile images, and 60% of people with 10 or more goals have profile images.” He also explains why the Lost page is not the best sample. Thanks much, Erik.
Anyone from Flickr, last.fm, or other sites that use blank face profile defaults want to contribute their numbers? Even a rough comparison of scale (“More than twice what Erik reports” or “A lot less” or whatever) would be interesting.
Update 3: Stewart Butterfield from Flickr/Yahoo says in the comments that “On Flickr, 44.3% of people who have uploaded at least one photo have personalized their buddy icon and the % goes up dramatically with the number of photos uploaded. ” He also notes that the community features (including groups like the one I surveyed) have a higher percentage of custom faces than otherwise. Thanks, Stewart!
So, a little more than twice the people with one photo uploaded on Flickr, compared to people with one goal on 43Things, have customized their faces. Still not definitive because of the photosite/non-photosite difference, but persuasive. We need more data! last.fm? Anyone else?
Thanks much to everyone who has contributed ideas and data. This is turning out to be one of my favorite things about Radar — the non-proprietary data sharing in threads like this one and Tim’s “Database War Stories” posts. Let’s do more of this.