Interested to hear how the 90-9-1 Principle plays out in the real world? A very simple example is a cocktail party. Think about a group conversation at a cocktail party. Typically there are 2 or 3 people having a bulk of the conversation, a few more than that who are also pitching in small parts of the conversation, and the bulk of the group standing and listening to the conversation.

In the online social space, we can see examples that track very directly to the 90%, 9%, 1% split.

• 167,113 of Amazon’s book reviews were contributed by just a few “top-100″ reviewers.
• Over 50% of all the Wikipedia edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people.
• In December 20, 2007 on the MSDN Community site, 1866 edits out of 10851 total edits were made by the top five contributors (three of whom are Microsoft employees). That percentage is slightly above one percent at 1.72%.
• Just 0.16% of all visitors to YouTube upload videos to it, and 0.2% of visitors to Flickr upload photos.