The Guardian, a daily newspaper in the UK, recently published stats on the size of their online community. Martin Belam took a closer look…
498,600 users leaving comments out of a total audience of 70.5 million is 0.7%…
Half a million users have left at least one comment. Not bad. But the traditional rule of thumb on internet community participation rates says that 1 in 10 users will participate. The Guardian has found that the rule of thumb is off by at least a factor of 10.
And it gets worse. Just 2,600 of the Guardian's users left at least 40 comments — in other words, they participated every day. 2,600 out of 70.5 million.
That's a rate of 0.0037%.
If we applied that to a fairly typical mid-sized B2B site that gets five to ten thousand unique visitors per month, then we get 0.37 heavy commenters (tops). That, of course, assumes that this hypothetical B2B site publishes new articles every day so that it attracts loyal daily visitors like The Guardian.
We might, if lucky, also get 70 people to leave one comment each; that may look okay in a few blogs, but probably not when spread over the dozens needed to draw daily visits.
The Takeaway
If you want a thriving comment community, you need at least 50,000 unique visitors per month and frequent new content to draw them. Then you could reasonably hope for 350 comments per month, across all your articles, and expect one or two heavy contributors to comment every day.
But if you don't have at least 50,000 unique visitors per month, you're likely to create the impression of a ghost town.
The astute reader will note I've made sweeping generalizations to simplify, such as assuming traffic is evenly distributed, that B2B site visitors are like news site visitors (definitely not true), and that the B2B blog content encourages people to share their opinions. Your mileage may vary.
And also, my colleague Patrick offered some food for thought:
Your numbers are compelling... but they don't answer the the question: "What % of the 70 million users of the site find value in the comments from the 0.7%?"
