There is a fact about your roster that almost nothing in the Skool interface tells you: a meaningful share of the people in your community are running communities of their own.
How many members are also owners?
About 22% of Skool members run a community themselves. The measured figure among members whose activity can be read is 32.2%, and the hard floor — counting only what can be confirmed outright — is 19.4%.
The 22% is the modelled middle of that range, and it is the figure to quote. In a 500-member community that is roughly 110 people who are also on the other side of the table.
Does it depend on how active they are?
Enormously, and this is the part that changes decisions:
Among your most active members, two in three run their own community. Among the least active, it is one in fourteen.
That is close to a tenfold difference, and it lines up with everything else in this research: activity concentrates hard, and the people at the top of the curve are qualitatively different from the people at the bottom. Your engine — the roughly 2.15% of members who write three quarters of your posts — is drawn from the same pool as this 67.6%.
Put plainly: the people who make your community feel alive are mostly operators.
Why does this matter?
Three consequences, in increasing order of how much they should change what you do.
They are a sophisticated audience, not a beginner one. Someone running their own community has already made the decisions you are helping others make — what to charge, how to onboard, what to post. Content pitched at first-timers is being read by a group who are past it. That is not a reason to stop writing for beginners, but it is a reason to know that your most visible, most vocal members are probably not in that group.
They have different problems. An operator's questions are about retention, pricing, moderation and burnout, not about getting started. Those are also the questions they will answer for other members if asked, which makes them the most useful people in your room — owner posts get more engagement partly because of who is in the audience, and the same logic makes an operator's answer land harder than yours in some threads.
They are the natural buyers for anything operational. If you sell tools, services or higher-tier access aimed at people running communities, roughly a fifth of your roster qualifies — and two thirds of your most engaged members do. That is a much better-qualified segment than any cold list, and it is already inside the room.
Are they competitors?
Some of them, and it is worth being clear-eyed rather than anxious about it.
Members are not exclusive. About 71.5% of a typical roster's Skool activity happens somewhere other than your community, and only about 1 in 370 gives a single community more than half their platform activity. How loyal Skool members are covers the full picture. Someone running a community in an adjacent niche is both a member of yours and a rival for the same attention.
The practical stance is that this is normal and mostly benign — until it is not. A member who owns a community containing a large overlap with your own roster is in a different category from one running something unrelated, and that distinction is measurable rather than a matter of suspicion. Seeing what communities your members are in is the job.
The scope worth stating: this range exists because ownership is only partly observable from outside. 19.4% is a floor — communities that can be confirmed as owned. 32.2% is the rate among members whose activity is readable, which skews toward more active members. 22% is the modelled figure across the whole population, and it carries that model's assumptions.
What should you do with this?
Ask a different question in onboarding. "Do you run a community yourself?" is a single field that splits your roster into two groups with different needs, and it costs nothing to collect.
Give the operators something to do. They are your most likely contributors and they have answers other members want. An explicit invitation to answer in their area beats a general prompt, and it converts a competitor-adjacent member into an asset.
Pitch operational offers inward before outward. A fifth of your members, and two thirds of your core, are the buyer profile. Most owners go looking for that audience elsewhere while it sits in their own room unsegmented.
These figures come from The State of Skool 2026, an independent measurement of Skool communities. See the full report for the full ownership analysis and 21 other findings.