Do students raise their hands like the pic at left when a teacher asks the class a question? Not the classes I attended. After reading Aleksei Miheev’s post about the skewed participation percentages in web communities, I realized it’s very similar to the percentage of classroom volunteers. Here are a few snippets of his post.

Probably you’ve heard of “90–9-1” rule or figured something like that yourself. This is generally a rule of thumb, which states than in average 1% of your visitors actually “create” content, 9% “interact” with it, and the rest just “use” it (read, download, etc).

Here’s an example. There’s a message board on (partly) my Russian Rock Portal. There are 5092 members registered at the moment. Among them, there are just 991 members, who posted more than 10 messages, only 299, who has 100 messages or more, 61 person with at least 1000 postings, 5 (!) who posted 5000+ replies, and only 1 (one!) man left more than 10K messages (almost 15 thousands – he’s a great guy and listens lots of music every days and writes a lot about it). You see? 5.87% members posted almost a half of all messages, and about 1% left a third of all messages.

Getting people actually involved in your site versus signing up/visiting is so much harder. As I’ve mentioned before, web users like to be voyeurs first and interactive second. New users like to take tour around and explore and if you’re lucky they’ll maybe even interact. Then you have to find a way to bring them back to your site without badgering them. What are you doing to bring people back to your blog, web site or community?

Flickr photo credit: cschwa17 - shot taken at Pearl Jam concert, not a classroom

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