The Guardian has pulled together some statistics suggesting that for every 100 people online only 1 person will create content and 10 will “interact” with it. The other 89 will just view it.

Here are some stats from the article:

• each day at YouTube there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads
• 50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users
• in Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, 1% of the user population might start 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

My own research with Trish Milne shows a similar ratio. In our survey of ActKM members (a mostly online knowledge management community of practice) 78% said they’ve never contributed to the online discussion yet were regular readers. The regular posters on ActKM would account for about 1–5% of the membership.

The important message for me is this: look after your content creators because it’s tough building online communities and you must encourage those people who contribute.

[thanks to Nerida Hart for the pointer]

Milne, P. & Callahan, S. D. 2006. ActKM: the story of a community. Journal of Knowledge Management, 10(1): 108-118.