At the Web 2.0 Summit, market researcher Nielsen//NetRatings reported Web 2.0 sites doubled their traffic this year — becoming the fastest-growing category on the Web.
Web 2.0 –defined loosely in the session as those allowing users to “talk” to their “friends” via e-mail, messaging, blogs, and other social media tools–ranked first in year-over-year growth in unique audience and Web pages viewed. That’s ahead of categories including news and information, ISPs, video and movies, and family resources.
Social networking sites with the highest traffic growth included Feedburner (385%), Digg.com (286%), MySpace (170%), Wikipedia (161%), and Facebook (134%). Web 2.0 sites they identified include Yelp, which has user restaurant reviews; Dogster, for dog lovers; online gaming community Xfire; Eons, aimed at baby boomers 50 and over; and video-sharing service BitTorrent.
Kevin Rose said Digg has 600k editors. Yesterday the Rumsfeld resignation story took just 4 minutes to hit the homepage.
Nielsen’s Charles Buchwalter predicted a bright future for video advertising–in particular, for Web 2.0 sites. “There’s no question video is going to play a huge role,” he said. Market researcher eMarketer forecast online video advertising to grow to $2.9 billion by 2010 in a study released Monday.
Some speculated that a new dot-com bubble might be at hand, with the acquisition of MySpace by News Corporation, Skype by eBay and YouTube by Google as well as the possible acquisition of Facebook by Yahoo. C/Net reviews the Top 10 dot-com Flops.
Of course that was then. This is now.
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