New Data: 79.2% Participate in Online Communities
A few months back, I blogged about some Jakob Nielsen data claiming that 90% of people don’t actively participate in their online communites, 9% participating sometimes, and 1% doing the heavy lifting.
At the time, I was skeptical of those numbers, but the main point of the post was to take Nielsen mildly to task for his pejorative use of the term “lurkers” to characterize the passive participants. (Note: while I was characteristically fussing about the words, Joseph Carrabis was equally characteristically analyzing the numbers.)
Jakob Nielsen’s data is compelling as an elegant story, where 1% > 9% > 90% describes the inverse proportionality of production to participation has a beautiful symmetry that also serves to cast the participants as a kind of elite.
But while it’s a powerful narrative, is it true?
The latest data from the Center for the Digital Future, which my friend Jeff Cole presented last week at our iMedia Brand Summit, suggests that the Jakob Nielsen data is off. According to the Center, when asked, “How much would you say you have contributed to the building of your online community?” their respondents replied “a lot” 25.7% of the time and “somewhat” 53.5% of the time, adding up to 79.2% active participants. Only 20.8% replying “Not at all.”
This reinforces Nielsen’s notion of power contributors, but that group is much higher than 1%.
You can download Jeff’s slides here.
Note that I haven’t done an apples to apples comparison between the two data sets, and that there are some fuzzy descriptions about the different sorts of characterization. Moreover, I think that Nielsen has a good point when he argues that one way of increasing participation is to make a user’s clickstream part of participation (see his bullet “Make participation a side effect.”) John Battelle calls this sort of clickstream info “the database of our intentions.”
While the nature of internet and how people use it continues to shift and shift radically, I think it’s safe to say that participation in online communities is moving into the mainstream.
2 Responses to “New Data: 79.2% Participate in Online Communities”
1 Jakob Nielsen 15 February 2007 @ 11:23 am
Please note that this is a survey, not data. It’s purely self-reported info on what people *say* they do. Since it’s considered to be a positive to have contributed, people are likely to over-state their own contributions when they are asked (either because they mis-remember or because they exaggerate) .
Second, of course, surveys can have a biased sample (I can’t tell from that slide set how the sample was derived or what the response rate was). You can easily imagine that the people who contribute the most to online communities would be the most likely to respond to this type of survey.
Most important, even if we believe the self-reported answers, they still don’t contradict the empirical finding of participation inequality from twenty years of research: Even if 26% have actually contributed “a lot” to “the building of your online community”, those same people are almost certainly lurkers in a huge number of other communities.
Remember, that participation inequality doesn’t say that 90% of humans never contribute anywhere. It says that 90% of users of any particular system are lurkers. Somebody may be a lurker in one location and a contributor someplace else. That doesn’t change the fact that for *your* website (whatever it may be), the vast majority of your contributions are probably made by 1% of your unique users, and 90% of your users are likely to be lurkers.
2 Brad Berens 15 February 2007 @ 11:57 am
Thank you for the quick comment!
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