I hope this means paizo never listen to any of our opinions, and by us I mean the majority on this forum (who tend to disagree with me on most things).
Contrasted, Paizo and GitP target a niche audience. The userbase of sites like these tend to be far more engaged in the subject matter, and have a higher level of participation.
This.
I think a site with a broad, general appeal will get more lurkers. It would not surprise me if users of a board like Paizo or GitP were far more engaged.
Could either of you give an example of a more general forum than giantitp or paizo? As I understand it, the whole point of a forum is usually to bring a specific group of people together to communicate about a shared interest. Every forum I've been to, the membership numbers just don't add up with the people who would have had to viewed it for the .002% statistic to be accurate. Something Awful, which not only has a cost to join and covers a wide range of topics, would need over 8 billion of the population to have seen the website at one point.
I'm not disagreeing that a more general forum would have viewer members per viewers, but .002% is absolutely ridiculous. Even in the most general case, I imagine the number would be much closer to .02%, or ten times the original percentage.
A forum? No, I can't.
But a site, in general? Cracked.com's comment section is that general example:
We just had an article that was read by 305,396 unique users in a few days ... but fewer than 100 of them joined the conversation down in the comments. That's .002%, folks. It's not that the Cracked comments are mostly retarded or nasty; it's that for a normal person, the memory of getting called a f+*!tard in public even one time is striking enough to make them avoid the comments forever, even if it was accompanied by 10 non-f+%@tard comments. It's human nature to remember the f#&+tard.
That's where they're generating that ridiculous number, and attributing the fact that only 100 out of 305,396 unique readers commented to being kept away by "trolls".