October 4, 2006

According to a recent study done by comScore Media Metrix, Web sites based on UGC (user-generated content) are seeing important gains in their overall usage statistics in Great Britain, and comScore believes the trend will probably continue.

Just three months ago, the five UGC sites that ranked in the top fifty sites in England, measured by total visitors that month (Wikipedia, MySpace, Piczo, YouTube and Bebo) generated an average of 4.2 usage days and 79.9 minutes per user, according to comScore.

In comparison, Web sites in the top fifty that were not based on user-generated content had far less usage.

Overall, site visitors went to those properties an average of three-and-a-half days and spent about 33 minutes on average.

The page view statistics were even more surprising than comScore had released. Visitors to UGC sites viewed an average of 217 pages, compared with 52 at non-UGC sites.

To be sure, Bebo visitors viewed an impressive average of 428 pages during the month, while MySpace visitors viewed about 333.

These user-generated content sites have also experienced significant traffic growth in the last twelve months.

MySpace increased by 467 percent, to 5.2 million unique visitors in the UK in July.

Comparatively, Piczo rose by about 393 percent, to four million unique visitors.

"Many of the sites experiencing the fastest growth today are the ones that understand their audience's need for expression and have made it easy for them to share pictures, upload music and video, and provide their own commentary, thus stimulating others to do the same," said Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe.

But without seeing actual usage statistics for other sites in the UK's Top-50 List, it's rather difficult to learn exactly how dominant the UGC sites really are in the UK.

For example, in similar usage statistics released by comScore for the US market, several non-UGC site families generated more usage days than MySpace or Facebook.

Overall, Yahoo Web sites and the Time Warner Network generated 11.6 and 10.4 average usage days per visitor, respectively, followed by Microsoft sites and the Weatherbug property.

MySpace was fifth, with 8.7 usage days.

Source: eMarketer