beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2008-07-28 05:17 pm
beccaelizabeth) wrote2008-07-28 05:17 pm
lurker pyramids, fan critical mass, and finding friends
lurker pyramid effect.
participation inequality
"In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."
or
If your online community is 100 people then only 1 of them will be talking.
That 1 will get bored and wander off, and the comm will go quiet.
So you need 200 just to get 2 people talking to each other.
If you're looking to have enough of a fanfic community that it feels worthwhile to write up stories and share them, you need way more than that. Thousands.
Books get thousands of readers, but what percentage of them are interested in forming an online community? I don't have that data.
But Torchwood, a show with ratings that go up to 4 million viewers, has in its largest LJ comm about 4000 readers. Lurker pyramid says that's a 40 person conversation, which keeps it pretty lively. But they're not all posting fic.
If it takes 4 million readers to get a 40 person conversation... how many books get that? Really?
And even if they did, how many read it again the next week?
So there's more fanfic for TV because TV has a mass audience, about 1/1000 of them going online (is that right? less than a percent. 0.1%?), 99% of those lurking or posting infrequently, and 1% doing all the rest. Ratings of a million, conversation of 10.
Yeah, I know there's other Torchwood comms, and other countries of Torchwood viewer, plus the individual episode ratings arent the same as who saw all the episodes or who saw any episode.
Only 10% of the audience sees every episode, Teach said in Doctor Who class.
That probably doesn't mean that only 10% are watching any particular episode, does it? I mean 10% are definitely watching and the other 90% are wandering in and out.
... and those numbers look familiar: Lurkers to occaisional posters. Huh.
So anyways: Call those 10% followers, cause they follow every ep? But they're not all fans.
And not all fans are the in-fandom sort of fan.
And not everyone in fandom talks out loud much.
The loud fan opinions, the 40 out of 4 million? We're probably not a representative sample. Which is one reason fanfic diverges from pro fic and source texts, we're just a different subset than they're aiming for.
What I've just been thinking is, what does this do for my plan to find friends with similar interests? On LJ it works, we have manymany people here and the small fraction of them interested in samelike be still plenty many to read and talk to and stuff.
But in 3D?
I went to a Norwich SF club with only 3 people regularly go to it.
In this context, that seems to make a whole lot more sense.
Sure, there's more people stand in lines on signing days, or take a leaflet... but they're the lurkers.
*sigh*
Where I look for 3D friends then?
Well, conventions. There's hundreds of us at once in them.
... and then everyone goes home to places that aren't Norwich. Until next year.
See, difficulty of getting offline critical mass.
Football seems to have different numbers. Wonder how the numbers look between different participation levels there - the ones who read results, watch matches on free TV, watch on pay TV, or actually turn up at games? Does it look like the lurker pyramid again?
participation inequality
"In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."
or
If your online community is 100 people then only 1 of them will be talking.
That 1 will get bored and wander off, and the comm will go quiet.
So you need 200 just to get 2 people talking to each other.
If you're looking to have enough of a fanfic community that it feels worthwhile to write up stories and share them, you need way more than that. Thousands.
Books get thousands of readers, but what percentage of them are interested in forming an online community? I don't have that data.
But Torchwood, a show with ratings that go up to 4 million viewers, has in its largest LJ comm about 4000 readers. Lurker pyramid says that's a 40 person conversation, which keeps it pretty lively. But they're not all posting fic.
If it takes 4 million readers to get a 40 person conversation... how many books get that? Really?
And even if they did, how many read it again the next week?
So there's more fanfic for TV because TV has a mass audience, about 1/1000 of them going online (is that right? less than a percent. 0.1%?), 99% of those lurking or posting infrequently, and 1% doing all the rest. Ratings of a million, conversation of 10.
Yeah, I know there's other Torchwood comms, and other countries of Torchwood viewer, plus the individual episode ratings arent the same as who saw all the episodes or who saw any episode.
Only 10% of the audience sees every episode, Teach said in Doctor Who class.
That probably doesn't mean that only 10% are watching any particular episode, does it? I mean 10% are definitely watching and the other 90% are wandering in and out.
... and those numbers look familiar: Lurkers to occaisional posters. Huh.
So anyways: Call those 10% followers, cause they follow every ep? But they're not all fans.
And not all fans are the in-fandom sort of fan.
And not everyone in fandom talks out loud much.
The loud fan opinions, the 40 out of 4 million? We're probably not a representative sample. Which is one reason fanfic diverges from pro fic and source texts, we're just a different subset than they're aiming for.
What I've just been thinking is, what does this do for my plan to find friends with similar interests? On LJ it works, we have manymany people here and the small fraction of them interested in samelike be still plenty many to read and talk to and stuff.
But in 3D?
I went to a Norwich SF club with only 3 people regularly go to it.
In this context, that seems to make a whole lot more sense.
Sure, there's more people stand in lines on signing days, or take a leaflet... but they're the lurkers.
*sigh*
Where I look for 3D friends then?
Well, conventions. There's hundreds of us at once in them.
... and then everyone goes home to places that aren't Norwich. Until next year.
See, difficulty of getting offline critical mass.
Football seems to have different numbers. Wonder how the numbers look between different participation levels there - the ones who read results, watch matches on free TV, watch on pay TV, or actually turn up at games? Does it look like the lurker pyramid again?