Jakob Nielsen http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html has a great article up today. He postulates that in most online communities, 90% are lurkers, 9% of users contribute a little and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don’t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.
In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. This phenomenon of participation inequality was first studied in depth by Will Hill in the early ’90s, when he worked down the hall from me at Bell Communications Research.
User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:
- 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
- 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
- 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.
It reminds me of a saying of one of my professors during my medical studies in Vienna, which I shall remember for the rest of my life. He said to me: »You have to know one thing. If there are 100% sick people, then you can open the following accout. 90% of the 100% recover without any medical support, remain 10%. From these 10% die 9%, and, the tiny rest of 1% accounts for medical interventions.
But does this mean we should stop to intervene? Of course, not!
The same I think applies to blogging and other social activities on the internet. By just doing it things evolve, change, even if we can’t anticipate nor predict the outcome. The final outcome is of minor importance, the process of doing it is the essential.
For this reason it is definitely needed to cut down expectations and see the achievement as a welcome by-product of the process.
I am currently in San Francisco. Tomorrow, I have to go for running shoes. I’ll keep you posted. Here is a foto from my first lunch in town.
