The Loneliest Number

An interesting piece in the Guardian last week, especially for those designing for the web: “What is the 1% Rule?” Contrary to what the Web 2.0 hype has gotten into our collective, idealistic brains, the article reports that the actual interaction between a site and its users, is around just 1%. Meaning that, if your site gets 100 readers, only 1 of that group will post comments. The initial ideas for how much back-and-forth goes on, particularly now that the internet seems to want to become more a dialogue than just a whole bunch of individual speeches, was around 80% non-interaction, 20% interaction, but this appears to be way off.