What’s The Population of Web 2.0?

At any point of time there is a blog writing about the next hot “Web 2.0″ application or service. Because it lets you do something that YouTube, Flickr, MySpace etc…doesn’t let you do. But the real question is, How many people actually use all these new sites?

Web 2.0 is a very vague term, but hey what goes around comes around. The last few years were more or less when we started to see what comprises a lot of Web 2.0 websites today. For arguments sake, I’m only referring to sites where a user is able to create an account, upload, share, contribute, comment, vote or read personal opinions of other users on the same site.

If you look at this graph of youtube+myspace+digg+facebook+flickr you will see that the rise of the some of the most popular Web 2.0 sites began around mid 2005. With the exception of myspace having seen some traffic spikes near the end of 2004.

Now there is a distinction between the type of users that Web 2 sites have. For instance Digg users would not be caught dead on MySpace. Whereas a lot of MySpace users probably go over to Digg, they are easy to spot out once you start reading the comments.

User Overlapping

Many of the popular user generated content sites have an overlap of users. I’ll be the lab rat here and say that I have an account on YouTube, Flickr, Digg and Facebook. The only reason I would set up a MySpace account is for promotion purposes, I would never do so otherwise. That’s just me though, as obviously it is a very successful service.

From the sites that I am registered with I regularly use digg, I use Flickr to host some big images for this blog now and then, I have uploaded 3 videos to YouTube and only recently started using Facebook {since they went open to the public}. So as you can see just because I have an account on these sites doesn’t mean I use all of them on a regular basis. Many of these sites probably have hundreds of thousands if not millions of user accounts that have been forgotten or were set up for spamming purposes.

So when any site says they have millions of users doesn’t actually mean they are all active. Just like when a bunch of students are in a classroom doesn’t mean they’re all paying attention. {Disclosure: I was a back-bencher}

User Loyalty

On any user generated site you can tell the loyalists from the occasional users. The loyalists usually have a huge fan following or tons of friends. Users on YouTube have subscribers to their video channels, Flickr users either join groups or invite friends and can see uploading activity, facebook users love writing on walls, digg users like to digg friends submissions and “add friends” to their profile and so on.

If you look at any user profiles you can see exactly the type of popularity the user has. Some people just get all the luck and rack up friends no matter how hard they try not to. These people usually are pretty girls, or in some cases even guys.

Friends usually make other users come back more often to a site and spend more time interacting. So the amount of friends one has, the friends YOU actually added or invited, can ultimately decide the success of a site. The exception to the rule may be YouTube, because it’s sole feature is video and people love to watch real live action. You’ll hardly find a home without a TV around the developed world, but you’re more than likely to find one without a computer - which goes to show that video is popular. Just look at my list of sites that have online videos.

So what’s the population?

Too come to a conclusion about the population of Web 2.0 is actually impossible, as the web itself has generally moved in the user generated content arena. So at any point of time if anybody on the internet sets up a blog, watches a video online, uploads a photo, creates a profile where others can get to know more about them they have more or less become a statistic.

The population of the web is as high as the next person getting their internet connection. But the amount of people that end up actually using a web 2.0 service might not always be that high.