One of my favorite parts of this morning's keynote at Web 2.0 Expo was the joint session by Bill Tancer from HitWise and David Sifry from Technorati focusing on the numbers outlining the "participatory" aspect of Web 2.0 (note: Richard MacManus from R/WW had a similar detailed post on this session):
The participatory segment of Web 2.0 as a percentage of all users on the web increased from 2% in 2005 to 12% in 2007, resulting in a growth of 668%
Visits to Wikipedia outnumber visits to Encarta by 3400 to 1
In the education segment, the current market shares are: Wikipedia 26%, Yahoo Answers 5%, others 69%
Photo category of the Web now includes 913 sites
Web 2.0 photo sites account for 56% of Photo category visits
Photobucket is the leader of this segment with more than 40% market share
The proportion of participatory versus passive visitors at 3 key Web 2.0 sites are 0.16% for Youtube, 0.2% for Flickr and 4.59% for Wikipedia
As for the effect of gender on visitors versus participators (ie. users who upload videos on Youtube or edit/contribute content on Wikipedia):
Wikipedia (52% of all visitors are male vs 60% of participators are male)
Youtube (51% of visitors are male vs 76% of participators are male)
Youtube overtook Yahoo and Google's video sites in a matter of 6 weeks - 3 key demographic segments accounted for (and were disproportionately represented in) that rapid growth: Money & brains, Young digerati and Bohemian mix.
Yelp tops the category of websites expected to grow significantly based on the its leading market share in those same 3 key demographic segments:
Yelp users account for:
6.7% of Money and brains
6.6% of Young digerati
7.3% of Bohemian mix
David Sifry, CEO of Technorati
Technorati now indexes 70 million blogs;
120,000 blogs are currently created every day; 1.5M posts/day (58,000 posts/hr)
While the percentage of blogs staying active decreased to 21% in '07 from 36% in '06, the absolute number of active blogs went up to 15.3M over the same period from 13.7M
22% of most linked sites on the web are blogs (up from 12% from 6 months ago) including:
Engadget, Boing boing, Gizmodo and Techcrunch
3M people blog once a day
Highly influential bloggers post on average twice a day
Influential bloggers have been at it for nearly 2 years
88% of the Technorati Top 100 is different than what it was 1 year ago
Leading blogging language in the world now is Japanese (37%) followed by English (33%) and Chinese (8%) [note that Chinese users are underrepresented here]. Notable mentions are : Farsi (1%), Italian (3%) and Russian (2%).
237M posts were tagged in the last 2 years
14M posts to blogs per month with tags
(over 29% of blog posts last month used tags)
