As the community space heats up over the next year or so, metrics are going to become increasingly important. In an effort to provide some reasonably objective direction to this discussion, I am hereby proposing my Ten Rules for Measuring Online Communities. Some commentary and terminology notes follow the rule list if you're still with me by then. The most relevant metrics for measuring online communities are, in no particular order, unique visitors, page views, registered members, postings per month, time on site, posting ratio and audience penetration.
Unique visitors is defined by conventional auditing means.
Registered members includes only those people who have engaged in some sort of subscription process and have visited the site within three months. Users with multiple online personalities are counted only once. Subscriptions includes a count of all registered members as defined in Rule 4, allowing duplicate counting for registered members who participate in multiple communities or sub-communities on the same site or network. Postings per month includes message board, IM and mailing list postings, but not chat postings. Chat postings can be counted separately.