The amount of user content available on the web is staggering. Wikipedia has surpassed five million entries. In 2006, YouTube announced that it had served over 100 million video clips per day. With such an explosion of user-generated entries, photos and videos proliferating on the web, it appears that Web 2.0 is officially mainstream. Hitwise data gathered specifically for this note might indicate that actual participatory online visits, in general, amount to a very small percentage of overall visits to these new websites.

There is no arguing that websites encourage user participation through social networking and content generation. Over the last two years, market share of U.S. visits to the top 20 participatory websites has grown from 3% of all U.S. Internet visits for the week ending June 18, 2005 to over 15.5% for the week ending June 16, 2007; a growth rate of 416%. How much of this growth is attributable to the act of uploading user content versus viewing that same content?