twopointouch

If all this web 2.0 stuff is just a fad, then it’s got some impressive figures behind it.

Research company ComScore notes the growth of sites featuring social media in a release yesterday: “significant traffic growth versus [a] year ago propelled several of these sites into the Top 50 UK Web property rankings in July 2006″.

Wikipedia moved up from 78th to 16th place in one year, while MySpace moved from to 89th position to number 27.

Selected Properties* Featuring User-Generated Content (UGC) Based on Top 50 UK Internet Properties July 2006 vs. July 2005 Source: comScore Media Metrix
Property	Rank Among Top UK Properties		Unique Visitors (000)
	Jul-05	Jul-06	Jul-05	Jul-06	% Change
Wikipedia Sites	78	16	1,852	6,545	253
MySpace.com	89	27	913	5,173	467
Piczo.com	91	43	820	4,049	393
YouTube.com	N/A	47	N/A	3,918	N/A
Bebo.com	90	48	912	3,902	328

The release goes on to note that social networks like MySpace and bebo also attract much longer visits than many of the top sites. The average visit time for top 50 sites over a month is 79.9 minutes, but the average bebo visitor puts in 145 minutes a month. The average time spent at Wikipedia is just 10.1 minutes, but since the average visitor is there to look things up rather than write an article, this makes a lot of sense.

The release doesn’t mention which sites have lost ground to make way for these Web 2.0 newcomers. Since there are also a lot more internet users, year-on-year, it may not necessarily be the case that Web 1.0 sites are losing readers.

found via e-consultancy