Hitwise U.S. Research Note: Measuring Web 2.0 Consumer Participation

Hitwise US Research Note:
Measuring Web 2.0
Consumer Participation
June 2007
Bill TancerGeneral Manager, Global Research, Hitwise
The power of competitive intelligenceHitwise US Research Note - Measuring Web 2.0 Consumer Participation 1
The Growth of Web 2.0 Sites
The amount of user content available on the web is staggering. Wikipedia has surpassed ? ve million entries. In 2006, YouTube announced that it had served over 100 million video clips per day. With such an explosion of user-generated entries, photos and videos proliferating on the web, it appears that Web 2.0 is of? cially mainstream. Hitwise data gathered speci? cally for this note might indicate that actual participatory online visits, in general, amount to a very small percentage of overall visits to these new websites.
There is no arguing that websites encourage user participation through social networking and content generation. Over the last two years, market share of U.S. visits to the top 20 participatory websites has grown from 3% of all U.S. Internet visits for the week ending June 18, 2005 to over 15.5% for the week ending June 16, 2007; a growth rate of 416%. How much of this growth is attributable to the act of uploading user content versus viewing that same content?
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©2007 Hitwise Pty. Ltd. All trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.Hitwise US Research Note - Measuring Web 2.0 Consumer Participation 2
Death of the 80/20 Rule
In the late 1800s economist Vilfredo Pareto developed a principle now commonly known as the 80/20 rule, which in a business application states that 80% of output is attributable to 20% of resources or 80% of sales come from top 20% of clients. In the computer age that rule was amended to the 90/10 rule that stated that 90% of computer execution time of a computer program is attributable to 10% of that program's code. In the age of the participatory web, that rule may be further re? ned with what has been termed the 1% rule.
The 1% rule states that 1% of Internet users are creating user-generated content, 19% of users are interacting with that content, while 80% simply view that content as they might static Web 1.0 content. Leveraging custom analysis through Hitwise Conversions, we measured interaction visits for three websites for the month of May 2007; visits where videos were uploaded to YouTube, visits where photos were uploaded to Flickr and visits where users edited a Wikipedia entry.
Percentage Participatory U.S. Visits Compared to All Website Visits - May 2007
YouTube Flickr Wikipedia
0.18% 0.12% 4.38%
Visits to Video Uploads Visits to Photo Uploads Visits to Entry Edits
In the case of YouTube and Flickr, the percentage of participatory visits (video and photo uploads respectively) fall well below the expected 1%, while Wikipedia entry visits compared with website visits reached an impressive 4.38%. The disparity between YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia could be explained by the technical barrier of participation. YouTube and Flickr require some technical sophistication on behalf of the consumer (creating the video or photos, transferring the ? les to a computer, uploading the ? les to their respective websites) while Wikipedia edits require a simple mouse-click and text entry. The data gathered to-date through Hitwise Conversions indicate that the 1% rule may be open to further revision dependant on consumer sophistication and the ease of participation.
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©2007 Hitwise Pty. Ltd. All trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.Hitwise US Research Note - Measuring Web 2.0 Consumer Participation 3
Demographics of the Participator
Exactly who are these Web 2.0 participators? Hitwise Conversions provides us with a variety of demographic statistics for the above participatory visits, including age, gender and income levels as well as lifestyle data through the Claritas PRIZM NE segmentation. For all three websites, participators skewed male; 60% of Wikipedia entries and 55% of YouTube videos were "man"-made.
The age breakdown for Wikipedia edits con? rms the adage that the old are in fact, educating the young when it comes to communal encyclopedias; 53.6% of visitors e... [download for more]