Exactly. It's not about the absolute percentage of people using third-party services, it's about the users that matter: power users, moderators, and especially content posters/creators.
Wouldn't you expect that number of 1% for essentially any content uploading. Where out of every group of users, 80% don't interact at all, another 19% only comment, and the last 1% are the only ones that do anything more than comment?
Agreed. I don't know about the particular %, but sure, you are always going to have some users more active than others. It is certainly true for Hacker News. I'm sure a significant % of people using this site haven't even bothered to register. Perhaps pg could enlighten us as to an estimate of the actual %?
Unfortunately, I went to business school and remember the Pareto principle (80% of something comes from 20% of the population). The Feld post on 80-19-1 was a great read though b/c it talked about it in the context of user-generated content sites.
Basically the post says, at sites like Judy’s Book or Digg, 80% of users will always be passive, 19% of users sit on the fence, and only 1% of users are active and contribute.
I’m wondering what strategies these sites have come up with to tip that 19% over the fence to actively contribute, if there are any.
Only 175M of 500M? The people are Techcrunch are so out of touch with reality. That's more than 20% of users. If 20% of all your users are active, you should be commended.
This isn't surprising - what percentage of Wikipedia users actually contribute to Wikipedia? Probably less than 10%. What percentage of users actually comment on Hacker News? Probably not very high (I don't know, though).
You don't need all your users to be active to have a useful or viable product.
Facebook is an edge case - they have a huge percentage of active users.
I remember seeing a lot of stories 6-12 months ago that talked about the 1% rule for user-contributions to participatory web sites. 1% create content, 10% interact with it, and 89% pass it by.
But according to this fairly recent article from Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN17436388200..., the percentage of people that actually generate content is even lower. For example, only 0.16% of visitors to YouTube upload videos. And 0.2% of visits to Flickr are to upload new photos. Wikipedia fares better with 4.6% of visits used to make edits. But it's all a far cry from 20% of users generating content.
4.7% of your users... and how much of that is because you are finding it difficult to prioritise work specific to that platform? It sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem to me.
I suspect that's 98% of users in the literal sense, with a very long tail of them having very little traffic. It's not the same as 98% of user traffic, i.e. API requests. :-)
The 80% are anonymous lurkers or accounts that very rarely post anything.
The remaining 20% is split 15/5, with the former being frequent contributors to discussions - and the final 5% being _content submitters_ .
The 5% power users interact via 3rd party apps because, quite frankly, the "official" UIs (App, Website) are totally shite.
They also maintain the automated tooling to keep order of communities - again, accessed via API.
Without the 5% submitting content, the 15% won't interact and provide the remaining 80% material to read.
No material to consume = no advert page impressions = no revenue stream.
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