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Criticism of Web 2.0 sites remains weak

Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak | Technology | Internet | Reuters

Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found.

So let’s get this straight. 0.002 of the hits that Flickr gets are to upload photos. Which means that out of every million hits, two thousand are uploads. And by all estimates Flickr gets several million hits every day.
So if you actually do the maths that’s much better participation and distribution than traditional media.

You can see the headlines if 99% of hits were uploads. Web 2.0 would be vanity sites that no-one ever reads.

So assuming that participation is increasing (which it will even if the percentage remains constant) and that Web 2.0 allows mere consumption (which it clearly does), it is both a new kind of democratic media and a threat to traditional media. If only there was some way to misunderstand statistics in order to put a negative spin on this?