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Web 2.0 not so user-generated after all?
We still like to watch, study finds...

By Reuters

Published: Wednesday 18 April 2007

Web 2.0 is far less participatory than commonly assumed.

A tiny 0.16 per cent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, involve users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with web audience measurement company Hitwise.

Similarly, only two-tenths of one per cent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo!, are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found. The vast majority of visitors are the internet equivalent of the television generation's couch potatoes - voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, it found.

Cheat Sheets

♦ Web 2.0
♦ Mash-ups

Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit online encyclopedia, is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study: 4.6 per cent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site.

But despite relatively low-user involvement, visits to web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668 per cent in two years, Tancer said.

He told an audience of roughly 3,000 internet entrepreneurs, developers and financiers attending the Web 2.0 Expo industry conference in San Francisco this week: "Web 2.0 and participatory sites are really gaining traction."

Besides Wikipedia, other well-known web 2.0 destinations are social-network sites such as Facebook and News Corp's MySpace, and photo-sharing site Photobucket.

Visits by web users to the category of participatory web 2.0 sites account for 12 per cent of US web activity, up from only two per cent two years ago, the study showed.

Web 2.0 photo-sharing sites now account for 56 per cent of visits to all online photo sites. Of that, Photobucket alone accounts for 41 per cent of the traffic, Hitwise data shows.