90-9-1

I always refer to it as the "1-9-90" rule because that seems less confusing to say conversationally, but most definitions I've seen refer to it as the 90-9-1 rule.

The rule is actually a theory, which asserts that in most online communities, 90% of users are "lurkers" who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

In their book Groundswell, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li take the theory a bit further in presenting their Social Technographics ladder, which basically expands the three 90-9-1 groups into six categories. (In research parlance, that's called a finer level of granularity – which provides book authors and others with much more to talk about.)

Bernoff and Li's categories are composed of Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives. Creators are people who author blogs, own a Web site or otherwise originate online content. Critics react to content created by others by posting ratings or reviews or participating in online forums. Collectors save URLs or bookmark pages, joiners maintain profiles on social networking sites, spectators consume what the rest produce and inactives are doing other things besides being online at all.

That's probably more granularity than one needs to see the main point: all large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks share one property, which is that most users don't participate very much. In that sense, they can be said to "lurk" in the background.

I didn't coin the term and don't much care for it. Given the definition, I have many friends who could be described as lurkers when what they're actually doing is reading, observing or otherwise engaging. Just because somebody doesn't choose to blog or jump into an online discussion shouldn't earn them such a pejorative label. OK, no more ranting (in this post).

This 90-9-1 paradigm where 90% of users are non-contributors (ah, now that's a much nicer term), 9% contribute from time to time, and 1% of users account for most contributions underscores an essential point that is easily missed amid the percentages and labels: all online users matter.

One could even say that the 1% of users who always seem to be online matter too much in that they are not representative of whatever group they're from. Whether the group is EDA, the electronics industry or the world in general, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from.

This has several valuable implications – and that will be the subject of my next blog post!