A fantastic blog post was put up last week, which has lead to a number of great discussions about member traction and engagement within communities. Dr. Mike Wu, Ph.D. posted metrics based on his study of over 200 online communities here.
As he writes, "The 90-9-1 rule simply states that:
- 90% of all users are lurkers. They read, search, navigate, and observe, but don't contribute
- 9% of all users contribute occasionally
- 1% of all users participate a lot and account for most of the content in the community"
The data he present generally backs this up. The comments both there and in a related LinkedIn community explore how he defined his terms, constraints of the data, and how to encourage engagement.
Do you agree with his findings? Do you see them reflected in your Ning Networks?
I look forward to his future posts, where he promises to "dive deeper into the contribution level of the hyper-contributors, you community's real superusers."
