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Thursday, July 20, 2006

The 1% rule

Source: The Guardian

Charles Arthur notes that an emerging rule of thumb suggests that for every 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it. Examples? YouTube gets 100 million downloads per day and 65,000 uploads per day (wow). That's puts the creator to consumer ratio at 0.5 percent. On Wikipedia 50 percent of all article edits are done by 0.7 percent of all users and more than 70 percent of the articles have been written by 1.8 percent of all users. At Yahoo! Groups, 1 percent of the users will start a group, 10 percent will participate actively and 100 percent will benefit from the content. Plug that into your Web 2.0 business plan for a reality check.

Update 7/21/06 at 12:24pm EST:
The Guardian notes that they didn't check their math facts. The creator to consumer ratio on YouTube isn't 0.5 percent, it's 0.065 percent. But the 1% rule still holds in general.