Social Networks 1% rule

The Guardian Unlimited asks "What is this 1% rule?" "It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it."

Bradley Horowitz, VP of technology and development at Yahoo, wrote about this back in February calling it "Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers" Bradley said;

1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)

10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress

100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

Bradley is an old friend from my AltaVista days, and one of the smartest guys I know. This simple illustration by Bradley conveys the idea better than any words.

My experience with SiliconInvestor, one of the first investment discussion boards on the web, matches these findings. The contributor to commenter, to reader ratios were about the same. Later at Napster I saw a similar pattern. Very few people shared their music collections while millions downloaded.

Web 2.0 social network sites are finding the same thing. It takes a relatively small group of contributors to create the content. These contributors attract the commenters or editors, which in turn attracts the huge audience.

At Wikipedia about 50% of all article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users, according to the Church of the Customer blog (http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/).

This is why Jason Calacanis is offering to pay the top Digg contributors $1K per month to contribute at Netscape. Jason knows that these top contributors can instantly jumpstart his business.

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Comments

[Lloyd D Budd]

In my work with Flock I see this, and we hear similar, consistent percentages from our partners and potential partners.

[Max The IT pro]

This is great info for website owners that also use blogs and forums to provide an exceptional level of Customer Service compared with the competition. I just started 2 blogs (AyoMotoring, LifeSize Magazine) for our AyoAfrica.com web portal and I would like the braintrust to be vigilant about contributing content instead of me doing EVERYTHING. I shall point them to this link.

Once again, great post Don.

{See the blogs here: http://AyoMotoring.BlogSpot.com | http://LifeSizeMag.BlogSpot.com }

[David Armano]

Don,

I just got a serious flashback after looking at this pyramid. I started visualizing this kind of thing in a similar way and ended up re-thinking it based off slews of feedback from lots of bloggers. Take a look.

Pyramid
http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/08/levels_of_influ.html

Ripples
http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/08/influence_rippl.html

And more Ripples
http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/08/influence_rippl_1.html

Would love your feedback.