What is the 1% rule?

By Charles ArthurThe Guardian

Translation: ShiningRay

An emerging rule tells us that if your site has 100 people online, only 1 will create new content, 10 will interact with it (reply or provide improvements), and the remaining 89 will just browse.

YouTube's statistics show almost the same thing. YouTube went from zero in 18 months and now accounts for 60% of all online video viewing.

The data shows that there are 1 billion downloads and 65,000 uploads per day - as Antony Mayfield points out, 1,538 downloads per upload - and 20m per month per unique user.

The "creator to consumer" ratio in this data is only 0.5%, but it's too soon to be resolved, because not everyone has discovered YouTube (and downloading is much easier than uploading, because any web page can include a YouTube link).

Consider some other statistics for projects that rely on community-generated content, Wikipedia: 50% of all Wikipedia articles are edited by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of articles are written by 1.8% of users. the data comes from the Church of the Customer's Blog.

Early data collected from some community sites showed that about 80% of the content was generated by 20% of the users, but the growing volume of data gives a clear picture of how Web 2.0 sites should be thinking. For example, a website that requires a lot of user interaction and user-generated content will find that 9 out of 10 people are just passing through.

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo points out that the same thing applies to Yahoo: on Yahoo Groups, "1% of the user population might create a discussion group; 10% of users are likely to be actively engaged and actually create new content -- starting a new theme or replying to an existing one; 100% of users can benefit from the activities of previous users, "he said on his Blog in February.

So what's the conclusion? You can't expect too much from your online audience. The problem - as in real life - is finding the builders.