Do you know which members are earning $6.5 million each year

**milligan** · 12-04-2007, 09:40 AM

For something a little different I have been thinking about the Pareto (80/20) principle as it applies to SEO. The 80/20 principle basically states that 20% of participants will contribute 80% of results. For example this forum has 5197 members. If we added up all the income that all members earn in a year we could assume that 1039 members (20% of all members) from this forum would earn 80% of this sum. That means that 4157 members (or the balance of the membership) would have to share the 20% of what’s left.

This can then be applied further. Of the 1039 members who take the lions share of the income 20% of those will take 80% of the 80%. That is 208 members here will earn 64% of all the income, 42 will earn 51% of the income, 8 will earn 41% and 2 share the 33% that is left. Who’s confused?

OK what does this mean in dollar terms? I have used $6400 which takes the total of all US incomes and divides it by the total population. Why the total population and not just wage earners. Because not everyone on this forum is earning from this business yet just like the total population of a country. We are estimating here. This gives us a total earnings of $33,260,000 for all the members of the forum.

OK so now we can say that 1039 members of this forum will earn about $25,600 a year from this pursuit. Now this isn’t spectacular but you could live off it. To do this you need to be in the top 20%. Of all the members here the top 4% of earners, or about 208 members, will take home about $102,000 a year. Now we are talking. From here the incomes shoot through the roof. Less than 1% or only 42 members will average over $400,000 a year. 8 of the lucky buggers here will do around $1.6 million. The uber l33t members here, or about 2 of us, will take home the grand total of $6.5 million each year.

Now like me you are probably saying that these numbers are BS because they are sooooo big. Hey they may be but anything is possible. I think if you can’t believe these numbers are possible in this business you may be selling yourself short.

As a footnote I would like to clarify a few things. I know we are all not living in the US but most of the members here are. I for one am in Australia. At the end of the day these are estimates and thus do not necessarily represent reality but they should come close. To use these on a small sample of the population that is probably not a good demographical match to the population of any country as a whole will make these estimate vary greatly.

Sorry about any typos but I haven't got my contacts in at the moment. Hope this gives someone food for thought or maybe even some inspiration

**Winchester** · 03-07-2012, 07:50 PM

While it's good math you have to remember that its a principle of average cases on much larger communities.

It works out to the top earners making roughly $15,000 a day. Which based on average pricing would likely be 223 sales a day of a $67 product.

People out there who operate a fleet of tools or automated services on monthly subscription would likely be the top earners but I still doubt its' quite that high. Another close runner would be anyone operating a strong series of re-seller services but we don't have enough of a market to do that kind of volume either.