Web contributors 'are attention seekers not altruistic'

London, Oct 5 : People who regularly upload material to the Internet are just attention seekers, confirms a new research.

"Crowdsourced" websites like YouTube and Wikipedia' success have been a puzzle for psychologists for a long time - as a small number of people do most of the work for little obvious reward - while the rest benefit seemingly without giving anything back.

One commonly held notion for that is people just feel good helping out the community, reports New Scientist.

However, now researchers at Hewlett-Packard's lab in Palo Alto, California, have shown that contributors are in it for personal glory, not public service.

To reach the conclusion, the research team analysed the habits of 580,000 YouTube contributors and found that the more hits their videos got, the more likely they were to continue uploading material.

ANI