Hitwise recently reported on the traffic details for question and answer Web sites. Not surprisingly, Yahoo! Answers received the bulk of this traffic, with a few other sites lending a hand to curious users looking to take advantage of user-generated wisdom of crowds.
For the week ending March 15, 2008, Yahoo! Answers attracted 74.05% of the market share for the question and answers realm of the Internet. Though this is a large share, it was a noticeable decline from the 94.25% market share it held during the week ending March 17, 2007, reflecting a 21% drop. This is primarily due to the emergence of competition in the market.
WikiAnswers was second during the same week, with 18.35% of the U.S. market. Data was not available from last year.
Answerbag was third with 4.51% of the total market share, an 83% increase from the 2.46% market share it held last year.
Ask MetaFilter was fourth on the list with 1.80% of the market, a 4% decline from its 1.88% market share last year.
Meanwhile, the biggest gainer was Askville, whose market share grew 316% from last year’s 0.20% to this year’s 0.85%.
Overall, the question and answer category has grown 889% from February 2006 to February 2008.
About 52% of all visitors to the top five question and answer sites were female for the week ending March 15, 2008. Most of the visitors were between 35 and 44 years of age, while the second most frequent age group was 25-34.
Yahoo! Answers held its users’ attention for the longest, with an average time spent on its site pegged at 9 minutes and 9 seconds. Askville was second, holding its users’ attention for 7 minutes and 20 seconds, followed by WikiAnswers (4 minutes and 17 seconds), Answerbag (3 minutes and 31 seconds), and Ask MetaFilter (1 minute and 44 seconds).
Yahoo! Answers also had the largest proportion (49%) of its user base as returning visitors, followed by WikiAnswers (24%), Ask MetaFilter (15%), Answerbag (13%), and Askville (7%).
Askville, on the other hand, had the largest proportion (93%) of its user base as new visitors, followed by Answerbag (87%), Ask MetaFilter (85%), WikiAnswers (76%), and Yahoo! Answers (52%).
Source:
http://hitwise.com/press-center/hitwiseHS2004/
question-and-answer-websites.php
Jason Hahn
e: jhahn221@gmail.com
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