Re:26k blockchain projects launched in 2016, 92% are now dead
by alangpierce on Saturday December 30, 2017 @11:13AM
(#16035824)
GitHub organizations are actually free (although, of course, there are paid plans for private repos and enterprise features): https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-new-organization...
It's often a way that people group collections of related subprojects of an open source project, e.g. Babel is an org, with babel/babel being the primary repo: https://github.com/babel
People who make an org rather than just a project are probably more serious about it, which explains the higher activity rate, but it's still just "someone on the internet tried out an idea".
If anything, I'm surprised about 10% are still active. If you compare it to the failure rate of formal (money-backed) initiatives of startups in general, or say restaurants, or hell, people starting a workout routine this time a year, it's not a particularly unique failure rate.
edit: they later differentiate between users/organisations. The latter has about double the activity rate (15%) after a year. But they define organisations using GitHub's definition, which can be had for as little as $300 a year. At that level the difference between user and organisation is probably limited to the difference between casual user and casual entrepreneur.