

Ask HN: What's the fraction of lurkers vs active users? - Anon84

In your respective blogs or collaborative sites, what is the proportion of "lurkers" vs the number of active users?
By active I mean creating content in one form or another (commenting, tagging, etc...). I imagine this information would be useful in planning how to monetize sites that depend on user collaboration and participation.  Is there any larger scale data on this?
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nostrademons
FictionAlley (Harry Potter fanfiction) was a 100:10:1 ratio - we usually had
about 10-20 simultaneous users actually posting on the forums or fanfic sites,
100-200 registered users browsing, and 1000 simultaneous unregistered guests
(out of a total registered userbase of about 100k). This seems fairly typical
of most community-oriented sites.

Diffle (Flash games hosting) maxed out at about 1200 uniques/month, a dozen or
two registered users, and about 6 that actually contributed content or games.
Similar ratios, but fewer registered visitors because people go to flash games
sites to play and you didn't need to be registered to play.

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unalone
I think Hacker News might have a significantly lower rate of lurkers, because
of the fact that it keeps itself out of the public eye. OmegasEye, an old site
of mine, had very little lurking, because the people who knew about it were
usually its members. Hacker News isn't _that_ obscure, but it isn't a site
that attempt to make itself high-profile.

