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

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 refined 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.
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 files to a computer, uploading the files 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.

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 confirms the adage that the old are in fact, educating the young when it comes to communal encyclopedias; 53.6% of visitors editing Wikipedia entries were over the age of 45 while 47.7% of visitors to Wikipedia were below the age of 35. Over 77% of Wikipedia editors had household incomes less than $60,000 per year. Taken in conjunction with the age statistics it is possible that a key Wikipedia editorial segment is in fact retired (older, fixed income).

Takeaways for the Online Marketer
Web 2.0 sites are growing at an impressive clip. The category should be monitored as a potential branding and acquisition channel. However, visit and demographic metrics reveal that participation in Web 2.0 sites is still nascent. Early adoption should be more prevalent in those websites with limited technology barriers to participation, such as those limited to simple textual edits (Wikipedia, blogs, and MySpace profiles). Adoption, in the form of participation, will be much slower amongst video uploading websites.

Terms Used in this Report
Hitwise provides clients with various metrics for analyzing competitive activity. Hitwise defines these metrics in conjunction with the industry standard definitions published by the US Internet Advertising Bureau’s Media Measurement Task Force on ‘Metrics and Methodology.’ The IAB’s Media Measurement Task Force has published guidelines for the comparative measurement of website usage:
User Visit: A series of page requests by a visitor without 30 consecutive minutes of inactivity, identified by a collection of page requests from a unique identifier.
Market Share: The percentage of all visits or page requests to a particular online market sector that is received by the individual website.
All Sites: Includes all websites visited by US Internet users across all 160+ Hitwise categories except Adult, ISPs and Ad Servers.