Web 2.0 Websites Accounted For 12 Percent Of All US Web Traffic

April 27, 2007; 12:50 AM
Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, announced today that web 2.0 websites accounted for 12 percent of all US web activity for the week ending April 7, 2007. That figure represents an increase of two percent compared to two years ago and over the past two years the market share of visits to those properties has grown 688 percent. The findings are from a keynote presentation that Bill Tancer, Hitwise general manager of global research, gave at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo on April 17.

The study was based on the Hitwise U.S. sample of over 10 million Internet users, which revealed results from a recent research study on demographic and psychographic differences between "traditional" and Web 2.0 internet users. Tancer presented on the “State of the Web 2.0: Measuring the Participatory Web”, providing insights on popular and growing Web 2.0 websites that included:

• Some Web 2.0 properties are dominating their category, for example, Wikipedia is the number one educational reference website with over 26 percent market share of visits for a category of 3,272 sites. US visits to Wikipedia outnumber Encarta 3400 to 1 for the week ending April 7, 2007.

• Of the US visits to YouTube for the week ending April 7, the 18-24 represented the largest demographic of “viewers” while the 35-44 demographic represented the largest percentage of users who uploaded a video. Only 0.16 percent of those visits for the week ending April 7 involved a user uploading a video to the website and of those users 76 percent were male.

• Of the US visits to Wikipedia for the week ending April 7, the 18-24 represented the largest demographic of “viewers” while the 45-54 demographic represented the largest percentage of users who edited entries. More than 4.50 percent of those visits for the week ending April 7 involved a user editing entries to the website and of those users 60 percent were male.

• Of the US visits to Flickr for the week ending April 7, 0.20 percent of those visits involved a user uploading photos to the website.

“Web 2.0 websites like YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia have achieved mainstream adoption for visits to their website”, said Tancer. “It’s the participatory aspect of Web 2.0 that is still in a very nascent stage. When online participation goes mainstream we can expect an explosion of new content on the web.”

The Next Hot Web 2.0 Websites

Websites such as Yelp, StumbleUpon, imeem, Veoh, WeeWorld and Piczo could represent the next wave of popular Web 2.0 websites. The websites are already popular among early adopters by cross referencing the Hitwise Lifestyle Segmentation data from groups such as Young and Digerati, Money and Brains and Bohemian Mix. The websites all over indexed among these groups compared to Internet average of all US websites.