EclecticLip

Via Rob Cottingham’s excellent blog, I found 90-9-1, which breaks down contributions to social media websites.  It looks like these follow power law type distributions.

Here’s an image from the Wikipedia article, as a refresher.

So according to 90-9-1, online communities can be imagined as tripartite pyramids (see their image below) which break down as:

-   1% creators
-   9% editors
- 90% lurkers   (hey!  That’s almost always me!  )

They cite that half the edits to Wikipedia come from 0.7% of users (500 of them?!) and that roughly 0.2% of YouTube and Flickr users actually upload content themselves.
- - - - - - -
(The Pareto principle is a more moderate case of the Power Law.)