Dr. Michael Wu, Ph.D. is Lithium's Principal Scientist of Analytics, digging into the complex dynamics of social interaction and online communities.
He's a regular blogger on the Lithosphere an...
Updated 6 months ago
Version 9.0
Blog Post
Dr. Wu,
Yes, I meant 65% - thanks for catching that.
Your points are well made - when I considered the 65% , it was the percentage of registered users who had posted at least once. I agree that if one were to consider all the unregistered user sessions in the whole of the community (which would greatly increase the denominator) then the percentage of contributors and hyper contributors would shrink significantly. I elected not to look at it that way for two reasons:
1) I wanted to restrict my consideration to those had taken the time to register an ID and log in - taking the first step to joining the community and in some way demonstrating their intent formally to do so.
2) As registered users (myself included) may visit and browse the community at times without logging in, I considered that I might be double counting these actions, and incorrectly attributing them to the pool of lurkers since there is no way to know without the person having logged in, or some complex IP address lookup, whether or not they were already a member in the community, and whether or not they had posted at least once.
I did my "back of the envelope" analysis based on a long term cumulative view of the community - all users over time. I played a bit with the date function on the social graph tool and went back to the beginning of the community and browsed through at various points in time over several years. I could see some of the super contributors on the graph, and a few have fallen off if they left the community, having not contributed enough to make it into the all time top 20, as seen the cumulative view.
So, through the aperture of a point in time, the percentage contributions could change quite a bit depending on the overall size of the community and the number and characteristics of those hyper-contributors. Both views - cumulative vs point in time have their own merits. I'm going with cumulative overall when discussing characteristics of our community. However the point in time view can help spot emerging talent / rising stars, so keeping a 30-60-90 day view is handy as well..
Mark