Web 2.0 Audience in Mirror May Be Smaller Than It Appears
by John Paczkowski
Posted on May 7, 2007 at 11:37 AM PT
How ironic is it that Web 2.0–the “participatory Web”–has far fewer participants than its architects would have us believe? According to a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the only world Web 2.0 has conquered is the one that gave birth to it. Pew found that only 8% of Americans have taken an active interest in the Web 2.0 phenom. Far greater is the percentage of adults who have little or no interest in it at all. “Fully half of adults have a more distant or nonexistent relationship to modern information technology,” the report explains. “Some of this diffidence is driven by people’s concerns about information overload; some is related to people’s sense that their gadgets have more capacity than users can master; some is connected to people’s sense that things like blogging and creating home-brew videos for YouTube is not for them.”
I guess Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was right: Nobody even knows what Web 2.0 means.
“It was very surprising to see just how small a group uses the full potential of modern information and communication technology and just how large a group hardly uses it at all,” John B. Horrigan, Pew’s associate director for research, told the Dallas Morning News. “I read and hear so much about people who write blogs and post pictures on Flickr and watch TV on their cellphones; I expected them to be a much larger group than they actually are.”
Comments
John, one of those special moments for me at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in SF was hearing a VC tell a crowd of hopeful entrepreneurs and developers, “We are not a market.” Talk about popping their balloon! I wrote about it in my event recap on Read/Write Web. A lot has to happen yet if Web 2.0 is to go mainstream, and this study should certainly jolt a lot of the extreme-elites out there back into reality.
regards,
Posted by Graeme Thickins at May 7th, 2007 at 1:26 pmGraeme
http://www.tech-surf-blog.com
I think one of the biggest mistakes in marketing the concept of the “user generated web” or Web 2.0 was that it lead many entrepreneurs to believe that what they were building were businesses versus merely new features for existing websites and portals. The two way interactivity has certainly changed the web as we know it, but its a logical evolution of the web brought about by newer and cheaper technologies… and hence does not represent a “new market”.
Posted by Trip Foster at May 7th, 2007 at 2:49 pmMy quick math tells me the size of the “Ominvores” is only about 15 million people. More attractive from my standpoint is the nearly 50 million more pragmatic/practical users out there.
See my full analysis at http://replytoall.typepad.com
Posted by Robert Pease at May 8th, 2007 at 10:54 am