Comments on: Got any stats on lurkers vs. contributors?

Question: Got any stats on lurkers vs. contributors?

moift — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:44:10 -0800

Are there any statistics available regarding the number of lurkers versus contributors on sites with community-generated content?

I'm thinking primarily of social sites and wikis, but would appreciate data similar data about lurkers vs. commenters on sites with otherwise non-community-generated content. Even participation statistics on the metadata level, like song plays vs. song ratings would be helpful.

The PDF about the relative contribution of Wikipedia "Elite" linked here is a good example of the kind of data I'm having trouble finding. Do you remember seeing anything else like this?

By: jacquilynne

jacquilynne — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:55:17 -0800

This is hand-wavey, but it's generally considered to be a kind of power rule. Only 10% of your readers will register, only 10% of your registered users will post, only 10% of your posters will post regularly, and 10% of your regulars will generate most of your content.

By: moift

moift — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:08:33 -0800

Thank you, that's interesting. The Wikipedia stats appear to overlap closely with that model, and you've given me some more fruitful search terms.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:13:26 -0800

This is the site that I think started a lot of that, Jakob Nielson's post on the participation inequality gap. It's not specifically geared towards user-generated content and it's based on old research but it has a "ring true" quality to it and a few meaty facts and sources. The basic line is

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

You can probably run some numbers form the MeFi Infodump if you want to see if that measures up here, but I seem to recall that it's not far off.

By: tkolar

tkolar — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:34:34 -0800

Alas, the lurker data is not available from MeFi Infodump...

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:42:46 -0800

Anecdotal, but we've just gone past 100 members at the Team Fortress 2 Mefight Club site I'm running for our gang of players, and of those, 47 have never commented, and another 15 have commented less than 10 times, while the group of power-user types (about 15 more) are all over 100-200 comments.

By: pjern

pjern — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:51:56 -0800

So, does the 90/9/1 percent rule work for Metafilter?

By: datacenter refugee

datacenter refugee — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:32:46 -0800

While the focus of the article is not the same, Matthowie's Superfans & Noobs article on fortuito.us has some relevant data and links.

By: w.fugawe

w.fugawe — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 05:08:54 -0800

I've found the 1% rule of thumb to be pretty useful. I've had technical discussion with a couple of community sites and found it pretty accurate in vetting the grandiose claims that they were making about their user base versus what their usage stats were showing.

By: mdn

mdn — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:28:41 -0800

Just thought it worth pointing out that Jacquilynne's "hand wavey" statement adds two orders of magnitude to the numbers Jessamyn provides, one by dividing lurkers into readers and registered users, and two by dividing those who post less than the uber-posters into those who post at all and those who post "regularly" but without "generating most of the content".

Point being, 1 in 10,000 is different from 1 in 100, so just because the "10%" rule seems consistent, doesn't mean your two favorited statements are in agreement.

By: moift

moift — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:09:57 -0800

Right, thanks mdn. The data fit with the model linked by Jessamyn. Particular thanks also to stav for the stats and to everyone else for your help.

By: jacquilynne

jacquilynne — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:26:02 -0800

I may have inserted some extra power levels in my post. I remember more the power rule aspect of what I've previously read and not so much the specific levels that fall on the power scales.

By: chase

chase — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:39:24 -0800

Clay Shirky, in "Here Comes Everybody, the Power of Organizing Without Organizations" talks about power law distribution in Chapter 5. He mentions the 80/20 rule. However, the actual stats for participation in communities are quite variable and not easily measured. The value of a single contribution to a community can not be measured against volume. "Any system described by a power law, where mean, median, and mode are so different... by definition most participants are below average."