I was getting into the topic of user-created online communities, and I wanted to have a comparison, so I picked a semi-obvious one, Yahoo! Groups / Egroups. I wanted to do some basic statistics to show why I believed LiveJournal communities to be significantly more interactive and better... but I was surprised at just how right my assumption was.
To come up with my statistics, I took five clearly defined LiveJournal communities (Pagan, bondagefaeries, vegetarian, bisexual, anime) and compared them with their closest Yahoo! Groups comparison. (Pagan, hentai, vegetarian recipes, bisexual, anime).
I calculated the number of all posts and replies over the course of January so far for each group, and divided that result by the number of members for the group. This, essentially, gives us an average amount of posts per member. The higher the number, the more active the group is.
And now, the results:
Yahoo! Groups / E-groups
Group Av. posts per member for January
pagan 169/701=.24
hentai 404/2334=.17
vegetarian 54/240=.22
bisexual 170/393 = .43
anime 20/195=.10
Overall average: 817/3863= .21 posts per member per month
LiveJournal Communities
Group Av. posts per member for January
pagan 52/67=.78
bond.faer. 57/30=1.9
vegetarian 172/77=2.23
bisexual 521/126 =4.13
anime 198/23=8.6
Overall average: 1000/323= 3.09 posts per member per month.
In other words, our online communities may be nearly 15 times more active per user than Yahoo!/E-groups. If any of you have the time to examine a few other groups in the same manner so we can develop more accurate statistics, I would very much appreciate it, and will update our statistics to reflect what you find out.