Online Communities and Their Impact on Business. Part Two: Leading Web Destinations and Community

In our strategy work with tech companies, we’re frequently asked about web communities — how they operate, what they can and can’t do, and how a company should look to work with them. To help answer those questions, we surveyed more than 3,000 US web users on their overall Internet usage, and then dived deep on their use of online communities and what impact those communities have on their lives. This report summarizes the findings and implications to companies.

Part One (link) discussed how online communities work. This part continues with a discussion of the leading web destinations and online communities.

Community sites are among the top online destinations, no matter how you measure it

Although many people think of online community as an emerging trend, community sites are already some of the most popular and influential destinations on the web. To explore that, the survey looked at site usage rates.

Website popularity: Search is #1, but what comes next?

There is no single best way to measure the popularity of websites. Is a popular site the one with the most visitors every day, or the one that the largest number of people eventually visit, even if they come only once a month? The answer is that it depends on what the site is trying to accomplish.

In the survey, we looked at the popularity of websites in three ways:

• Which types of sites have the most intense usage — the largest number of daily visitors?


• Which types of sites have the broadest usage — they don’t necessarily have a lot of daily usage, but are eventually visited by most of the population?


• Which specific sites create the most loyalty — large numbers of people say they would pay a monthly fee to access the site?

In all three approaches, search websites ranked #1. But the rankings below #1 varied a lot.

Sites with the most intense usage

Measured by percent of web users visiting them daily, the top five categories of web site are:

Top five most visited web categories

The high rating for social networking sites was driven by very heavy usage among young people. For example, 65% of 19-21year olds visit social sites every day. In contrast, news, sports, and online banking were all more popular among older users:

Percent of web users in each age band visiting a website daily.

The popularity of sports news websites was driven mostly by men. 22% of men in the survey said they visit sports news sites daily, compared to 4% of women.

At the end of this section you’ll find a full list of the site categories tested and their usage rates.

Sites with the broadest usage

Some websites don’t necessarily generate a lot of daily usage, but are the place to go for certain types of information or services that many people need from time to time. Those sites are best identified by the percent of web users who ever visit them. By that measure, the top five categories of site were:

Top five web categories with the broadest audiences

Other categories with very broad user bases included medical information and auction sites.

Niche sites. Some prominent categories of website have attracted relatively small groups of intense users but haven’t attracted a broad audience. Among the site categories we asked about, the ones with the narrowest user bases were:

Five web categories with narrow audiences

In other words, despite all the publicity about them, dating websites have never been visited by 80% of web users, and virtual reality sites like SecondLife have never been visited by 77% of web users. They may or may not be very successful financially, but they are serving a niche.

The one exception to the niche categorization may be pornography sites. For men they are a major category, with 56% of men visiting at least occasionally. But for women they are a narrow niche, with only 15% of women ever visiting. (Or at least those are the percentages of people who will admit to visiting.)

The most valued sites: YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook stand out

We gave users a list of the most-visited general-use and community websites (as reported by Alexa), plus selected sites that have been covered heavily in the tech press recently. We asked which sites, if any, the users would be willing to pay $2 per month to access. Note that this question really measures loyalty. It doesn’t measure the actual monetary value of the sites, and we’re not advocating that any of these sites should start charging a fee to visit.

Google was, as expected, the most valued site. Without search, it’s hard to use the web in general. Yahoo came in second. We think that’s not due just to Yahoo search, but also to the many other features of Yahoo’s site. Six of the top ten websites are community sites.

The top ten sites are:

Ten most valued websites

Once again, young people had a strong influence on these rankings. They were much more willing than older users to pay for the social sites and YouTube. Older users were more willing to pay for eBay and MapQuest.

Young people value websites more

Young people were generally willing to pay for access to a larger number of web sites. The average 13-14 year old was willing to pay for access to 4.3 sites, while the average 31-40 year old was willing to pay for 1.9. We don’t know if that’s because younger people value the web more, or because they would expect their parents to do the actual paying:

Number of sites an average user would be willing to pay for, by age

The full list of website valuations is at the end of this post.

Comparing the ratings by age gives some other interesting insights:

Communities: Facebook more valued than MySpace

Percent of each age group willing to pay $2 / month to visit

Comparing some popular community sites, Facebook was about as valued as YouTube, and both were rated ahead of MySpace. SecondLife had a very low valuation, while LinkedIn was one of the few community sites to get a higher value rating from older users. That’s not surprising, since LinkedIn focuses on career networking for people after college.

Even among older users, though, Facebook and MySpace were both more highly valued than LinkedIn. We didn’t expect that result. The difference may be that LinkedIn is generally used to maintain professional contacts, while even older Facebook and MySpace members use the sites for a broader range of social activities.

Search and portals: Google and Yahoo ahead of everyone else

Percent of each age group willing to pay $2 / month to visit

It’s difficult to do direct comparisons between these sites because Yahoo, AOL, and the Microsoft sites all act as portals in addition to search engines, whereas Google is pure search. But the results confirm that Google is in the lead, and Yahoo is firmly in second place. This chart makes it pretty clear why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo.

Reference and news sites: Wikipedia more valuable than any single news site

Percent of each age group willing to pay $2 / month to visit

Although news sites in general attract a lot of visitors, there are many different sites carrying news, and this depresses the perceived value of any one of them. By contrast, there are few substitutes for Wikipedia, so it gets a higher score in all age groups, but especially among students who use it to help with homework.

CNN.com and ESPN.com were both perceived as more valuable than NYTimes.com.

Photo sharing: Photobucket ahead of Flickr

Percent of each age group willing to pay $2 / month to visit

One interesting head to head comparison was between photo sharing sites. Flickr probably gets more publicity in the technology press, but Photobucket has a strong lead in valuation, driven by its stronger appeal to young people.

Full results for frequency of visits and valuation

Frequency and breadth of visits

Percent of web users visiting various site categories, and how often they visit

Website valuation

Percent of web users willing to pay $2 per month for access

That’s the end of Part Two. Part Three concludes the report with a look at the role of online community in the social lives of Americans. Click here to read it.

Permalink | Post a comment | Post a trackback
del.icio.us | digg | newsvine | google

---

---

Leave a comment:

Name
Email Address
URL
Remember personal info?
Comments (You may use HTML tags for style) Verification (needed to reduce spam):