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Lurker demographics: counting the silent

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Published:01 April 2000Publication History

ABSTRACT

As online groups grow in number and type, understanding lurking is becoming increasingly important. Recent reports indicate that lurkers make up over 90% of online groups, yet little is known about them.

This paper presents a demographic study of lurking in email-based discussion lists (DLs) with an emphasis on health and software-support DLs. Four primary questions are examined. One, how prevalent is lurking, and do health and software-support DLs differ? Two, how do lurking levels vary as the definition is broadened from zero posts in 12 weeks to 3 or fewer posts in 12 weeks? Three, is there a relationship between lurking and the size of the DL, and four, is there a relationship between lurking and traffic level?

When lurking is defined as no posts, the mean lurking level for all DLs is lower than the reported 90%. Health-support DLs have on average significantly fewer lurkers (46%) than software-support DLs (82%). Lurking varies widely ranging from 0 to 99%. The relationships between lurking, group size and traffic are also examined.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CHI '00: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        April 2000
        587 pages
        ISBN:1581132166
        DOI:10.1145/332040

        Copyright © 2000 ACM

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        • Published: 1 April 2000

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