Are you a one-percenter?

What's the 1% rule? It's that in a web 2.0 community, 1% of the users will take leadership roles in creating new content, 10% will "interact" with it (comments, ratings, responses), and 89% will just sit back and enjoy the show.

Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz applies the 1% rule to Yahoo Groups:

"1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups."

All 100% benefit, but the work of the community is done by a very few at the top, and a small circle around them to offer encouragement and motivation.

How it works elsewhere:

• 50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users.
  
• On YouTube each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads - or 1,538 downloads per upload.

I suppose all this makes me a one-percenter. I have created Yahoo Groups (as well as participated in others). I have both edited Wikipedia articles and written new ones. And, I have posted over 50 original videos to YouTube. Oh, yeah, and I'm an active blogger.

The conclusion, and lesson for would-be web-entrepreneurs? "Certainly, to echo Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. The trouble, as in real life, is finding the builders."