A thought-provoking piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian discusses what he calls “the 1% rule”. Anyone who has run the gamut of internet sites, from forums to blogs, will recognize this little piece of wisdom:

“It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will ‘interact’ with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.”

How does he come by this information? “… each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads — which is 1,538 downloads per upload — and 20m unique users per month”. So the creator to consumer ratio is 0.5%,

In Wikipedia, 50% of all article-edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users.

“Earlier metrics garnered from community sites suggested that about 80% of content was produced by 20% of the users [there's that 80/20 principle again].”

It’s clear from this that a site that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of 10 people pass it by.

In Yahoo Groups: “1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content.”

The trouble, says Arthur, as in real life, is “finding the builders”.

The exception to this trend, I would say, are tech development sites, like IE blog, where vast numbers of comments easily outgun the posts. But, apart from that, the trend is clearly true.

Blogging, like any other form of publishing, is about finding writers with the talent, motivation and stamina to produce good content over time. They are not easy to come by.

Any form of media is about publishing, and publishing hasn’t changed since the earliest days of printing. Only a very few have what it takes to make a decent book/blog/video etc. Good publishers (i.e. successful media operators) will recognize that it’s a minority activity.

It always has been, and it always will be.