Nielsen, NetRatings Find Web 2.0 On Top

What doubled its collective online traffic over the course of a single year? Why, the Web 2.0 world, of course.

Nielsen, partnered with NetRatings, released data that showed Web 2.0 ahead of all other sites, save for the strongest and most prolific of search engines - yeah, guess which one that is. Anyway, I was somewhat struck by the news, and not because of the fact that The New York Times wasn’t the destination of billions. Rather, the growth spurts didn’t seem to correlate with media buzz very well.

We all know Digg has been bookmarked in more installations of Firefox, Opera, Safari, and (cough) IE (cough) than actual people roaming our dear friend Earth (Please don’t try to discount me on this one. You’ll only take away my thunder.), but did it occur to any of you that Feedburner, with a record 385% rise in usage, made Digg’s 286% look downright paltry? OK, maybe not paltry, but you get the gist.

Myspace trailed Digg with 170% year-on-year growth, followed close behind by Wikipedia and Facebook, at 161% and 134%, respectively.

There is always some room for hyperbole when dealing with findings such as this. Percentage hardly allows for a solid tally without hard numbers as backup. If you were to have 5 visitors to your site last month, and this month the average is at 20, you’ve gone up 300% in 30 days. Sounds big, but is it really?

Well, in a way, yes. These booming firms aren’t hitting those dull corporate investor estimates of 10% long-term increases. There’s only one direction this bad bunch is going: up. Also, these figures aren’t as flaky as many analysts have been predicting them to be since the dot-com bust. Their retention rates are increasing in a trajectory that looks similar to Google’s returns on past estimates. There are fewer and fewer arriving at Myspace and Facebook and leaving soon thereafter.

This is great news for both the leaders and followers of Web 2.0. Not only does this mean that Digg isn’t just another flight of fancy that’s fighting the skeptics with hollow insides, but people use the aggregator, and others like it, can rely on this new generation of destinations sticking around ‘til the end. And maybe, just maybe, that end won’t be seen the next time Wall Street wreaks havoc on Silicon Valley – if such a repeat occurs.