Will Blogging Follow the 1% Rule?

Posted on July 23, 2006

A Guardian article looks the 1% rule and what it means for content creation. The Guardian defines the 1% rule as "[for every] 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will 'interact' with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it."

The Guardian looked at how the content creation rule applied to content sharing tools like YouTube, Wikipedia and Yahoo Groups.

The Guardian article also cites Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo who created a pyramid to explain Yahoo Groups usage. Horowtiz also found that 1% of Yahoo Groups users will create their own group.

1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

If the 1% theory holds for blogging then a large number of blog readers are probably just happy having good blogs to read without having to do any of the work themselves. It also means the number of blogs in the world will probably peak at a number far less than the total number of potential blog makers.