One Percent Rule and Digg.com
July 23rd, 2006 at 20:43 under Articles.Late last week I was cruising around Digg.com and I picked up an article talking about how the top 100 Digg users submit over half the content to Digg.com. When I read through the article I couldn’t help but going “duh”. On Thursday I found another post that discussed a very familiar topic called the One Percent rule. I thought I’d share my thoughts on these two topics and I would love to hear some feedback from you guys.
According to Charles Arthur from Guardian Unlimited, there is a general “rule” that out of 100 people, 1 person will create content, 10 will interact with it, and the rest will just read the content. Charles points out a few important cases including YouTube which currently has a .5% creator/reader ratio. Bradley Horowitz wrote a very interesting article regarding the 1% rule for Yahoo! Groups. When you think about it, this rule holds to be very true in most cases. This rule holds fairly true in regards to forums, discussion boards, blogs, and even Digg.com!
Now in regards to Digg.com this gets very interesting. Often people say Digg.com is flawed because such a small minority controls the majority of the material flowing into Digg.com. What people fail to realize is that there is no limiting factor keeping people from submitting material, they simply don’t exercise their right. Digg simply has a small crowd of avid Diggers that find good material and post it and then continue to interact with the community. I know for a fact when my website gets heavily Dugg, usually you can multiply the number of Diggs by 10 and you’ll receive a rough estimate of the number of hits I will receive for that day due to that Digg. This is just another example of the 1% rule going into effect.
Now let me know what you guys think about this as I would love some feedback. Since on average I receive 350 unique hits a day, I should have 35 comments within 24 hours in regards to this topic. If you blog, let me know if this rule holds for you. If you manage websites let’s hear how your figures have come out in recent days. Either way perhaps this will shed some light into the world of online participation and helps explain why interactive websites tend to fail or become hugely popular.
July 23rd, 2006 at 9:09 pm
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July 24th, 2006 at 1:19 am
It’s an interesting theory but I don’t really think you can apply it to smaller-scale examples like a blog. Do you regularly get 35 comments a day? If you do, you’re lucky. Most bloggers consider themselves fortunate to get comments equal to 10% of their readership in a week.
Of course, it’s different with a huge community like Digg. There will always be those dedicated to the cause (akin to regular commenters on a blog, I suppose).
July 24th, 2006 at 5:24 am
I agree with you Richard, as much as I would like to see a decent amount of participation on this blog, I rarely if ever get any feedback. It definetly holds true when put to large-scale communities where the odds are better that you’ll get the right mix of users but it sort of breaks down a bit when you get to “our” size. Maybe someday this place will get wildly popular and achieve a 10% participation rate.
July 24th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
I think Richard is right. Another interesting thing I’ve found is that the vast majority of people who comment on my blog have blogs themselves.
July 24th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
I think that is due to the fact that we all know how ego inflating comments can be.
August 30th, 2006 at 7:43 pm
[…] It has been proven that Digg follows something similar to the 1% rule in regards to user interaction. You have a small cluster of users that submit the majority of material, a larger circle of users that vote on the material, and then you have the vast majority of users that play passive roles by spectating. In general the majority of spectators account for the majority of healthy traffic with people being genuinely interested in the material that they visit but just like all social environments you will attract users who try very hard to be negative and caustic in all manners of life. These particular users have a special place reserved in hell errr wikipedia for them under the Internet Troll category. In general trolls do a good job at ruining all positive effects that Digg could have by creating random disruption, spam, and in general highly negative comments. In regards to Digg, Blogs are one of the primary targets of trolls as they offer the trolls another object for them to rant about. To some trolls blogs are considered to be inappropriate in regards to being noticed on Digg which is unfortunate as a vast amount of interesting material is posted in blogs (my own blog as example). Digg trolls can make the process of being Dugg very stressful as they tend to leave negative comments on both the particular Digg article and the blog itself. I myself have grown a tough digital skin after being Dugg severely times but the first couple of times can be quite the trip. […]