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Beware: 0.2% could make or break your community
That useful euphemism the 80/20 rule doesn’t apply when it comes to measuring participation on the web.
Last week, at Web 2.0 Expo, Bill Tancer of Hitwise shared some hard numbers on how much participation is actually occurring at some of the most popular web 2.0 sites.
- YouTube – 0.16% (visits to upload video)
- Flickr – 0.2% (visits to upload photos)
- Wikipedia – 4.59% (visits to edit pages)
Out of all the traffic YouTube and Flickr get, 0.2% of people actually upload videos or share photos. Wikipedia kind of surprised me with 4.59% of people editing pages.
This is a profound reminder for companies and startups building online communities. A very small percentage of your members are highly relevant. The 99.8% of casual observes in the community cannot overshadow the 0.2% providing content, or the magic will disappear.
Bill also reminded us how precarious any leadership position is in the web 2.0 world. As an example, he showed how YouTube came out of no where to pass Yahoo and Google over 3 to 6 week periods respectively in video search. This hyper-rate of adoption has got to be scary executives, knowing that over the course of a holiday they could lose their market leading positions.
April 26th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
I get the same thing running a discussion group for psychologists. 80 members, and only 10% that are really active. The rest observe and interact rarely. However, when questioned, the “observers” still want to be part of the group. They get plenty out of just being on the edges of the group. I am surprised to hear how low the figures are in the online environment.
April 27th, 2007 at 9:08 am
I hear ya Gareth. I was initially blown away too by how small the number was.
On reflection however, it doesn’t seem so out of wack. Think about how many people go to YouTube purely to view - not upload. Then think about how many hits they get. YouTube is overwhelmingly a observer site - not a participatory one (as far as file uploads go).
April 27th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
And don’t forget the .0005% who left Flickr due to the mandatory Yahoo login thing.
July 15th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
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October 1st, 2007 at 6:53 pm
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