3% of users create 50% of content
Chang-Won Kim - who writes one of the great Asian blogs on the web industry - got some numbers on the participation of Korean users to online forums during the recent US beef crisis.
It turned out that the top 3.3% of the users contributed for nearly half of the whole posts; top 10% accounted for 71% of the entire postings.
This is a (rather dramatic) case that shows there are so few content creators (as opposed to content consumers) on the web. So forget about 20/80 rule - it’s more like 10/70, or even 3/50.
[…] The top 10 users logged whopping 21,180 posts during the last two months or so, averaging nearly 30 posts per day/person. Remember we’re talking about long articles, sometimes really really long. And most articles are well-written, as the authors are well aware of how much of hateful comments they will get if they do a crappy post.
The barriers to entry and regulatory mechanism are different in online forums but the result is the same: a little number of people making a lot of noise. Another case where online ends up mirroring offline.
