1% rule

For the aviation medicine rule, see 1% rule (aviation medicine).

In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining

to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the
users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99%
of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule
(sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states
that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants
of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants
change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.

Pie chart showing the proportion of lurkers, contributors and creators under the 90–9–1
principle

Similar rules are known in information science; for instance, the

80/20 rule known as the Pareto principle states that 20 percent of a
group will produce 80 percent of the activity, regardless of how the
activity is defined.

Definition and review

According to the 1% rule, about 1% of Internet users create content,
while 99% are just consumers of that content. For example, for every
:
 person who posts on a forum, generally about 99 other people view
that forum but do not post. The term was coined by authors and
bloggers Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba,[2] although earlier
references to the same concept[3] did not use this name.

The terms lurk and lurking, in reference to online activity, are used to
refer to online observation without engaging others in the internet
community.[4]

A 2005 study of radical jihadist internet forums found 87% of users

had never posted on the forums, 13% had posted at least once, 5%
had posted 50 or more times, and only 1% had posted 500 or more
times.[5]

A 2014 peer-reviewed paper entitled "The 1% Rule in Four Digital

Health Social Networks: An Observational Study" empirically
examined the 1% rule in health-oriented online forums. The paper
concluded that the 1% rule was consistent across the four support
groups, with a handful of "Superusers" generating the vast majority
of content.[6] A study later that year, from a separate group of
researchers, replicated the 2014 van Mierlo study in an online forum
for depression.[7] Results indicated that the distribution frequency of
the 1% rule fit followed Zipf's Law, which is a specific type of power
law.

The "90–9–1" version of this rule states that for websites where
users can both create and edit content, 1% of people create content,
9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without
contributing. However, the actual percentage is likely to vary
depending upon the subject. For example, if a forum requires
content submissions as a condition of entry, the percentage of
people who participate will probably be significantly higher than one
percent, but the content producers will still be a minority of users.
:
 This is validated in a study conducted by Michael Wu, who uses
economics techniques to analyze the participation inequality across
hundreds of communities segmented by industry, audience type,
and community focus.[8]

The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in

general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet
community. It is for this reason that one can see evidence for the 1%
principle on many websites, but aggregated together one can see a
different distribution. This latter distribution is still unknown and likely
to shift, but various researchers and pundits have speculated on how
to characterize the sum total of participation. Research in late 2012
suggested that only 23% of the population (rather than 90 percent)
could properly be classified as lurkers, while 17% of the population
could be classified as intense contributors of content.[9] Several
years prior, results were reported on a sample of students from
Chicago where 60 percent of the sample created content in some
form.[10]

Participation inequality
Main article: Participation inequality

A similar concept was introduced by Will Hill of AT&T Laboratories[11]

and later cited by Jakob Nielsen; this was the earliest known
reference to the term "participation inequality" in an online context.
[12] The term regained public attention in 2006 when it was used in a

strictly quantitative context within a blog entry on the topic of

marketing.[2]

See also
Digital citizen
:
 Internet culture
List of Internet phenomena
Lotka's law
Netocracy
Silent majority
Sturgeon's law
User-generated content

References
External links
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