Following on from the earlier post about people participating in communities I thought this post contained some great stats: The 1% Rule: Charting citizen participation. Points to the fact that 1% of Yahoo! Group members start groups and 10% of visitors ‘synthesize’ (or interact) with that content. On Wikipedia 1.8% of users have submitted 72% of the content.
The 72:1.8 rule isn’t as catchy as the 80:20 rule. But at the same time when people start banging on about user generated content it’s always handy to have some numbers like this in the back pocket. Read more.
Do you reckon this is an expression of The Long Tail distribution?
Normally it’s applied to websites and audience size but it seems to make sense for it to apply to content creation – always been the case from Usenet onwards that a tiny fraction of the community made most of the noise and everyone else just lurked – this is what allowed for the disproportionate effect of trolls on message boards.
Maybe this 1% of vocal participants might be those elusive opinion formers types we are always looking for ;)
They probably all read Dazed and Confused right? ;)