One percent rule (internet)

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Graphic illustration of the classic one percent rule in the form of the 90-9-1% rule.

The one percent rule (also: one percent rule , rarely: 1% rule ) is understood in net culture as the rule of thumb , according to which the vast majority of users of online communities do not contribute their own content , but just quietly read it (English to lurk , lurk around, listen). To put it bluntly, you go to wikis , web forums and social networksfrom only about one percent active contributors. According to a variant of the principle, there are one percent authors, nine or ten percent who, for example, post comments or edit the contributions of others, and 89 or 90 percent silent readers. Based on a model from economics , it is a special form of the Pareto principle , an 80:20 rule that states that 80 percent of the success of a project is due to 20 percent of the funds used. The one percent rule is now disputed to describe the use of social networks.

history

The one percent rule was formulated at an early stage and relates to participation in the Internet in general, even before Web 2.0. The earliest description of inequality in participation in online communities dates back to the 1990s. According to his own statements , the IT consultant Jakob Nielsen had adopted the concept of participation inequality from Will Hill. He used to describe the heterogeneity of participation on the web, which he imagined less like a community and more like a "huge impersonal city". Nielsen took up the concept again in 2006 to describe Web 2.0 when he coined the 90-9-1 rule in the form in which it is still known today: “Most users do not participate very much. Most of the time, they're just lurking in the background. In contrast, a disproportionately large amount of content and other activity comes from a tiny minority of all users. ”Nielsen illustrated his finding in the form of a pyramid with the passive users at the base and the active users at the top.

reception

Particularly noteworthy was a contribution that Charles Arthur also published in the British Guardian in 2006, but without reference to Nielsen . In order to underpin the one percent rule, he used the empirical values ​​from the Web 2.0 platforms , which were booming at the time . For example, he states that half of all articles on Wikipedia are written by just 0.7% of all authors, and more than 70% of all articles are by 1.8% of all authors. At the time, 100 million videos viewed on YouTube were compared to only 65,000 uploaded videos. Only 0.5% of users contributed content there.

Also, media theorist have the one-percent rule taken up, mostly critical. Nicholas Carr cited a 2006 statistic according to which 55% of all posts on the Digg platform came from the 100 most active users, while the ten most active among them contributed even 30% of the stories that are placed on the homepage. Geert Lovink stated succinctly in 2008 that a reason for this inequality in participation was not known.

Empirical Findings

New articles in the English language Wikipedia and author activity (2014)

More recently, there have been contradicting empirical findings on the validity of the one percent rule.

The ARD / ZDF online study has been investigating the use of online offers since 1997 and was still entitled in 2011: "Web 2.0: Active participation remains at a low level". At that time, the focus was on “one-to-many” communication, as is typical for blogs and wikis; it was compared to the social networks. At the time, 47 percent of all users found the “opportunity to actively write articles and post them on the Internet” to be “not at all interesting”; the value had not changed significantly since 2006. At that time, only 11 percent of all blog users were currently running their own blog, and almost a third were former bloggers. And only one percent of the users have “posted / written” something on Wikipedia.

Two years later in 2013 the study design was changed. The study now focused on the use of social networks and came to the result that 43 percent of all Internet users in Germany stated that they “write posts on profiles / send personal messages / chat” on a daily basis. 76 percent said they do this at least weekly, 84 percent at least monthly. Only 11 percent do this "less often" and only 5 percent never.

The BBC had also determined a higher proportion of active online users among the British in 2012 and, in the long term, came to the conclusion that the one percent rule no longer applies today. The proportion of those who actively participate online is "significantly higher than ten percent". 77 percent of all online users in the UK are now “active in one way or another” on the web, sharing photos or engaging in discussions. Only a hard core of about a quarter remains completely passive. The study is also the first to propose a thesis on the reason for inactivity. It has nothing to do with the technical competence of those; As so-called early adopters, 11 percent of the passives are particularly open to technical innovations and accept them early and quickly. Participation or non-participation in online communities is always a conscious decision of those affected. That is why the study speaks of a participation choice instead of a participation inequality in the sense of Nielsen . The study differentiates between four groups of users who behaved intensively (17%), “easy” ( easy , 60%) or passive (23%) online . Among the "casual" users, 44% would act proactively, while 16% only reacted.

In contrast, the processing statistics in the English language Wikipedia in January 2014 essentially confirmed the one percent rule. The evaluation differentiated between the number of edits and the number of newly created articles and came to the conclusion that 45% of all edits come from only 10,000 authors and the 850 bots that were active on the platform during this time. The 1000 authors with the most edits created 42% of all articles new; the next 1000 authors only 8%. In total, 60% of all articles in the English language Wikipedia were created by 5000 authors (0.026% of all users), but the remaining 40% by the "rest" of users (99.9%).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Geert Lovink : Zero Comments: Elements of a Critical Internet Culture, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89942-804-9 , page 29 with footnote 32.
  2. ^ A b Holly Goodier: BBC Online Briefing Spring 2012: The Participation Choice . In: BBC Internet Blog. May 4, 2012. Retrieved February 16, 2014.
  3. ↑ Jan Michael Ihl: From Web 2.0 to Read / Write Web . In: Thomas Schildhauer and Claudia Peppel (eds.): Yearbook for digital communication . Institute of Electronic Business. Affiliated institute of the Berlin University of the Arts. Volume 2. Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-89462-143-8 , pages 20, 20f.
  4. ↑ Jakob Nielsen: Community is Dead; Long live mega-collaboration . In: Nielsen Norman Group. August 15, 1997. Retrieved February 16, 2014.
  5. ^ A b Jakob Nielsen: Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute . In: Nielsen Norman Group. October 9, 2006. Retrieved February 16, 2014: "All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background. In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. This phenomenon of participation inequality was first studied in depth by Will Hill in the early '90s, when he worked down the hall from me at Bell Communications Research. "
  6. ^ Charles Arthur: What is the 1% rule? . In: The Guardian. July 20, 2006. Retrieved February 16, 2014.
  7. ↑ Michelle Manafy: The collective wisdom at work. (Web 2.0) (Product / service evaluation) ( Memento of the original from June 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.highbeam.com archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: EContent. Information Today. September 1, 2006. Retrieved via HighBeam Research from The Wikipedia Library on February 16, 2014.
  8. ↑ Nicholas Carr: Few to many . In: Rough Type. August 2, 2006. Retrieved February 16, 2014.
  9. ↑ Katrin Busemann and Christoph Gscheidle: Web2.0: Active participation remains at a low level . In: Media Perspektiven. 7-8 / 2011. Page 361 with table 2, 362, 363 with table 5.
  10. ↑ Katrin Busemann: Who uses what on the social web?  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.media-perspektiven.de   . In: Media Perspektiven 7-8 / 2013. Pages 391, 393f. with table 3 on page 394.
  11. ↑ Kevin Rutherford: The few who write Wikipedia . In: Wikipedia Signpost. 22th January 2014.