The people still known as the audience, part #153,568

More from Citimedia today (via Mathew Ingram) and Charlene Li on the people still known as the audience.

Over at Citimedia we are reminded of the 1-9-90 rule cited by David Sifry and Hitwise's Bill Tancer at the Web2.0 expo: "Spread across the Web, generally 1 percent of visitors are creators and producers, 9 percent are "highly involved participators" (don't ask me why the word "participants" isn't good enough), and 90 percent are consumers or viewers."

And at Forrester, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff put some numbers behind all our anecdotal assertions with a new report called Social Technographics (I've read their blog summary, not the report). See their "participation ladder" below? It doesn't exactly square with the 1-9-90 rule, but if you look at the overwhelming majority of people who make up the "spectators" and "inactives" category they add up to 88%. More comment on the report at Techmeme.



The best summary so far on this new orthodoxy that most people are still audience comes, I think, from Seth Finkelstein:

"You’re just replacing one set of gatekeepers with another. This is so obvious by now that it shouldn’t even be a question."