Life in the Network

I came across this article in Reuters about the success of Web 2.0. In the article it states that only 0.16 percent of visitors to YouTube are there to upload video and .02%, (two-tenths of one percent) of visitors to Flickr are there to upload photos.

The rest of us are just there to be couch potatoes and browse.

Here is the article:

Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak
Tue Apr 17, 2007 10:55PM EDT
By Eric Auchard
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Web 2.0, a catchphrase for the latest generation of Web sites where users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, is far less participatory than commonly assumed, a study showed on Tuesday.
A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise.
Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found.
The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation's couch potatoes -- voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer's statistics show.
Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit online encyclopedia, is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study: 4.6 percent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site.
But despite relatively low-user involvement, visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668 percent in two years, Tancer said.
"Web 2.0 and participatory sites (are) really gaining traction," he told an audience of roughly 3,000 Internet entrepreneurs, developers and financiers attending the Web 2.0 Expo industry conference in San Francisco this week.
Web 2.0, a phrase popularized by conference organizer Tim O'Reilly, refers to the current generation of Web sites that seek to turn viewers into contributors by giving them tools to write, post, comment and upload their own creative work.
Besides Wikipedia, other well-known Web 2.0 destinations are social network sites like News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook and photo-sharing site Photobucket.
Visits by Web users to the category of participatory Web 2.0 sites account for 12 percent of U.S. Web activity, up from only 2 percent two years ago, the study showed.
Web 2.0 photo-sharing sites now account for 56 percent of visits to all online photo sites. Of that, Photobucket alone accounts for 41 percent of the traffic, Hitwise data shows.
An older, first generation of sites, now in the minority, are photo-finishing sites that give users the ability to store, share and print photos.
© Reuters 2006. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.