User Content Driving Up-and-Coming Sites

Nielsen NetRatings finds that in July 2006, five of the ten fastest-growing sites on the Web are driven by user-generated content.

Media analysis firm Nielsen NetRatings has found that five of the top ten fasted-grown sites (er, “brands”) on the Web are being driven by user-generated content (PDF). Which may serve to prove many Internet users would rather watch a teenager make faces into their camera phone rather than read a good book…but we already knew civilization was in decline, right?

“User-generated content sites have seen significant growth over the past year, owing in large part to their reliance on viral marketing,” said Jon Gibs, Nielsen NetRatings director of media analytics in a statement. “They also benefit from their cost-effectiveness – the content is practically free.”

Although HSBC and traditional media outlet Associated Press found themselves doing pretty well in the ratings, among July’s fastest-growing brands image hosting site ImageShack came in fourth, video-sharing site Heavy.com took took number five, photo site Flickr came in sixth, and both MySpace and Wikipedia landed in the top ten.

In terms of year-over-year growth, MySpace was still the fastest growing Web brand, garnering soe 46 million unique visitors during July 2006. Google pulled in 94 million unique visitors during the same month, while eBay attracted 57.8 million unique visitors.

“MySpace is in a nearly unique position, because of its large audience base and its continued triple-digit growth,” said Gibs. “Only other popular user-generated content sites, such as YouTube, can rival it.” According to Nielsen, MySpace’s year-to-year growed was 183 percent; in comparison, number two Google grew a mere 23 percent and Microsoft, which landed in the number ten position, actually saw a negative five percent drop in visitors.

It’s best to treat these sort of evaluations of Web traffic, visitorship, and growth with a grain of salt: Nielsen is infamous for not specifying the sources of their data, and its impossible to evaluate the validity of their conclusions without knowing what their numbers represent, or whether those numbers are reliable. For instance, despite being noted as a site capable of rivaling MySpace in terms of grwoth, video sharing site YouTube didn’t even place in Nielsen’s collection of Web brand rankings for July, which could indicate something about YouTube…or about Nielsen NetRatings. No way to tell.