I missed this when it was released but a few days ago I stumbled upon Rubicon Consulting’s online community report. It’s very interesting and goes into a broad range of topics about site usage, online content creation, reviews and interaction among people on social sites. The data are segmented in various ways.
The report is based on findings from an online survey of slightly more than 3,000 US respondents over the age of 13. Rubicon reports that its representative of the online population and can be statistically projected accordingly.
Here are some of the charts (all created by Rubicon):
Categories most influenced by online/online information:
Influence of various information sources on purchase behavior (consumer comments second to WOM):
Most community/social content produced by 9% of online users:
Age distribution of “most frequent contributors” (the 9%):
Younger users more satisfied with social networks and social media sites:
Where are user profiles?
Percent of users by age who’ve falsified information online:
Rationale of those online who falsified information:
Most used categories of sites:
And based on the above data:
Search is the leading web category, but what comes after that?
It depends on how you ask the question. If you look at sites generating the most daily traffic, the most intensely used site categories after search are:
• Social networking (such as Facebook and MySpace),
• General news sites (such as CNN.com and NYTimes.com), and
• Online banking.
If you look at breadth of visitors (in other words, which sites are eventually visited by the largest percent of web users), the leaders after search are:
• Mapping (MapQuest and others),
• Retail (Amazon.com and others), and
• Reference (including Wikipedia).
Most valued websites (according to willingness to pay $2 per month for access):
