Web 2.0 Web sites accounted for 12 percent of all U.S. online traffic for the week ending April 7, 2007 according to a new study from Hitwise. That number represents an increase of two percent compared to two years ago.
In the past two years the market share of visits to those sites have increased 688 percent.
Certain Web 2.0 properties are dominating their category, like Wikipedia who is the leader when it comes to educational reference Web sites, with more than 26 percent market share of visits for a category of 3,272 sites. U.S. visits to Wikipedia outnumber Encarta 3400 to 1 for the week ending April 7.
Out of U.S. visits to YouTube, the 18-24 demographic had the largest number of viewers while the 35-44 demographic had the largest percentage of users who uploaded video to the site.
There was only a small 0.16 percent of users who uploaded video to YouTube and out of those that did so, 76 percent were male.
The largest demographic of users who visited Wikipedia for reference purposes were 18-24 year olds, while the 45-54 demographic was the largest percentage of users who edited entries. Over 4.5 percent of those visits were users editing entries, and of those, 60 percent were male.
“Web 2.0 websites like YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia have achieved mainstream adoption for visits to their website”, said Bill Tancer, Hitwise general manager of global research.
“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.”
