Online participation is often highly skewed, with a small minority producing most content; 90/9/1 is a rule of thumb rather than a fixed ratio.
Wikipedia is the standard illustration: a few thousand editors write most of a site read by billions. The proportions vary considerably between communities, and the durable point is that engagement metrics from a comment section describe the contributors rather than the readership.
In practice
- A company launches an internal forum and declares it a failure after a month because only eleven people have posted; the 900 who read it daily are invisible to the metric.
- A product team reads its app store reviews as customer sentiment, when the reviewers are the fraction angry or delighted enough to write, and the silent majority is neither.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is cost: reading, replying and creating differ by an order of magnitude in effort. Another is exposure, since visible contribution invites criticism that lurking avoids.
- In its favour
- Heavy skew is found in every online community that has been measured, and the rule is a useful corrective to reading a comment section as public opinion.
- Against it
- The proportions vary widely between platforms and tasks, and the figures are often quoted as though 90, 9 and 1 had been measured for the community in question when they have not.
- Standing
- A rule of thumb rather than a fixed ratio; the proportions vary considerably between communities.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Rules for speaking, writing and disagreeing