I’m not even going to try to out-do the in-depth analysis that Hitwise has done in their Consumer Generated Media Report.
The report also touches on something I was actually thinking about earlier today: The seasonality of social media.
It has been reported that there was a decline in visits to sites like MySpace and Facebook in September, which is a typical seasonal occurrence as school-aged users shift their attention from socializing online to academic pursuits. Last year, the market share of visits to the top 20 social networking sites decreased by 7.6% from August to September 2005, but recovered in October, increasing by 10.8% from September to October 2005. This year, a similar pattern emerged, with visits to the top 20 social networking sites decreasing by 7.3% from August to September 2006. Category traffic was flat from September to October 2006, indicating a slow down in growth, but by no means a decline.
Certainly very telling of the demographic for consumer-generated media as well as social media.
EDIT: When I was tagging this, I wanted to also tag it in a category that might contain articles that are focused on Wikipedia. Is there a name for sites such as Wikipedia, Digg, etc, where the value of the media comes from social collaboration, rather than individual contribution (blogs, social networks, etc)? I’ve labeled this as “Social Information Media” in the meantime, but was curious if anyone had set out to define what this may be referred to as.