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Bill Tancer over at Hitwise has down some excellent research around the participation rate of certain sites: that is, how many people actually upload videos to Youtube, contribute to Wikipedia and add photos to Flickr.
The coverage has thus far been pretty uniform in saying that less than 1% - or 5% in the case of Wikipedia - is weak. That’s a pretty disappointing conclusion to me.
The fact that in online communities 1% percent do a huge amount of the work, 19% contribute lightly and 80% are completely passive has been around for quite some time and isn’t likely to change.
In other mass media where interactivity is harder to pull off you have a .001 - 0 - 99.999 split between contributors and passive audience members.
People should celebrate that 1% are now contributing because that is a huge leap from what it was. And not only that, I think the most amazing change is the fact that someone with talent can get noticed and to the 1% in a lot more non-corrupt, micro-stepped and transparent fashion.
