80-19-1: Are the 19 Commentors?

I was all done talking about blog comments until I logged into Typepad today and noticed this. 

I find it kind of interesting that I have nearly as many comments as posts.  It doesn;t "feel" that way to me but the numbers don't lie.

Brad Feld is on the record that he thought the unknown dark matter in the space are "comments."  In other words if you could harness the information, perhaps even search the information, in comments it would be akin to unlocking a new found source of information previously untapped.

I agree, but I tend to drag it back to another interesting post, again by Brad, that said he thought of the Internet space by the 80-19-1 Rule..  As the Feldian theory goes, 1 percent of the population of the Internet are actually content producers, and 80% are the purely content consumers.  In the middle there are 19% that in aggregate produce about the same amount of content as the 1%.  This theory has resonated with me since the minute I read it and was critical in my thinking about targeting Lijit purely at publishers.  I think that focus has served us well.  Insert ourself in the value chain via publishers, the 1% we know share content, and at the end of the day - 1% of a huge number is still a huge number.  The other 99% (80+19) will interact with us through that 1%.

Companies like Me.dium are trying to make sense out of the content consumers, the 80%, by purely implicit inspection of their surfing behavior.  It makes sense, 80% of a huge number of users is a huge number of users.  I'm a fan of knowing your 'customer'..

All this brings me back to comments.  I believe that the 19% of the users that behave like the 1% may be the blog commentors out there.  If this is true then finding a good way to get to them is interesting to Lijit.  I think companies like BigSwerve, Intense Debate, and Disqus are probably onto something.

Comments

[Ross Carlson]

It seems to me that the only hard part you have is in explaining what Lijit is. I explained it to my mom like this "if you want to search all the things that I know on the net then use my (Lijit Wijit) blog search box". She said "oh, that's all, that's easy", then again she did spawn me so maybe at some level she gets it.