Jakob Niel­son, the lead­ing usabil­ity con­sul­tant, dis­cusses the par­tic­i­pa­tion inequal­ity of social com­mu­ni­ties, in which:

  • 90% of users are the “audi­ence”, or lurkers.
  • 9% of users are “edi­tors”; or those who participate.
  • 1% of users are “creators”.

More infor­ma­tion at 90–9-1: a web­site ded­i­cated to this ‘prin­ci­ple’ where you can view, among other things, these fas­ci­nat­ing statistics:

  • Over 50% of all the Wikipedia edits are done by just 0.7% of the users.
  • Just 0.16% of all vis­i­tors to YouTube upload videos to it, and 0.2% of vis­i­tors to Flickr upload photos.

Richard Milling­ton, Seth Godin’s 2008 sum­mer intern, offers us up some dif­fer­ent ways we can treat this the­ory.