The age of the ‘lurker’ is over, according to a new BBC report which debunks the widely accepted ‘1% rule’ of the Internet, which asserts that just 1% of users create content and 10% engage with them, while the rest of the world sits back and watches.
The 1% rule (illustrated above) states that the number of people who create content on the Internet represents approximately 1% (or less) of the people actually viewing that content (for example, for every person who posts on a forum, generally about 99 other people are viewing that forum but not posting).
The “90–9–1” version of this rule states that 1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing.
However, the BBC has carried out extensive research which it says shows this model is outmoded.
Digital participation based on activities such as sharing links, writing blogs and uploading photos is increasingly common according to Holly Goodier writing in the BBC Internet Blog.
Two of her key points are:
• Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
• 60% of the UK online population now participates in some way on the web, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.
Ease of use, ubiquity of devices and improved user experience contributes to the growing amount of people who get online and take part in activities, the report said.
Interestingly the BBC’s research says that lurkers are not necessarily people who are digitally illiterate or unable to gain access.
The study results say that 11% of passive web consumers today in the UK are early adopters who choose not to participate.
Holly Goodier, Head of Audiences for BBC Future Media said on the BBC Internet blog, “Digital participation now is best characterised through the lens of choice. These are the decisions we take about whether, when, with whom and around what, we will participate. Because participation is now much more about who we are, than what we have, or our digital skill.”
But, not everybody agrees that the BBC has proved that the 1% rule is no longer relevant. Bobbie Johnson, writing in Giga Om, argues:
The BBC appears to have missed the fact One Percent Rule was never intended to dictate a single pattern across the entire web: it was a rough guideline for expectations inside any given online community or service.
In other words, people might visit a whole variety of potentially interactive services such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and online forums, while only contributing to one or two. He quotes other statistics from the BBC showing how listeners to pop station Radio 1 participate and interact. The figures show, he says, that the 1% rule is not dead.
Of a total audience of 13 million, 150,000 actively create messages about the station on Twitter, and 1.5 million — and order of magnitude more — consume and interact with that content on Facebook. The remainder, more than 11 million people, simply listen to the show.
The BBC is using this research to create a new model to look at digital activity and is calling it ‘The Participation Choice’. It created an infograpic illustrating how the new audience participation model looks:
The BBC Participation Choice report is a combination of primary and secondary research conducted over the past 18 months. The data published today are all taken from the most recent, large scale survey of 7,500 UK adults – representative of the UK online population.
Read the full BBC research report here
