According to the 1% rule, about 1% of Internet users create content, while 99% are just consumers of that content. For example, for every person who posts on a forum, generally about 99 other people view that forum but do not post. The term was coined by authors and bloggers Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, although there were earlier references this concept A 2007 study of radical
jihadist Internet forums found 87% of users had never posted on the forums, 13% had posted at least once, 5% had posted 50 or more times, and only 1% had posted 500 or more times. A 2014 peer-reviewed paper entitled "The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks: An Observational Study" empirically examined the 1% rule in health-oriented online forums. The paper concluded that the 1% rule was consistent across the four support groups, with a handful of "Superusers" generating the vast majority of content. A study later that year, from a separate group of researchers, replicated the 2014 van Mierlo study in an online forum for depression. Results indicated that the distribution frequency of the 1% rule fit followed
Zipf's law, which is a specific type of
power law. The "90–9–1" version of this rule states that for websites where users can both create and edit content, 1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing. However, the actual percentage is likely to vary depending upon the subject. For example, if a forum requires content submissions as a condition of entry, the percentage of people who participate will probably be significantly higher than 1%, but the content producers will still be a minority of users. This is validated in a study conducted by Michael Wu, who uses economics techniques to analyze the participation inequality across hundreds of communities segmented by industry, audience type, and community focus. Several years prior, results were reported on a sample of students from Chicago where 60% of the sample created content in some form. ==Participation inequality==