Surfing blogs recently I came across this interesting yet entirely unsubstantiated fact: 60% of all new Internet content is now user-generated.

I don’t know if this stat is accurate, and probably never will, but it’s a reasonable estimate that reflects the web’s reemergence into a predominantly peer-to-peer publishing medium. I say reemergence because it was touch-and-go there for a while, in the shut-down-Napster, kill-iCraveTV, broadcast convergence mania of some years back, when the global content conglomerates tried to turn the web into a one-to-many medium. As many of us predicted, however, that attempt was doomed. Thanks to MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, LinkedIn, and countless terabytes of user-generated content, the inherently p2p nature of the web is now a mainstream fact. Only the real dinosaurs (like the music industry) still believe in the bad old dream of the top-down web. (Though admittedly there may still be important battles ahead. See my recent article Stopping the Copyright Wars of 2017 for my take on what those battles might be).

What would be really interesting would be to know what percentage of all viewed content is user-generated. If that’s a bit too much to ask we can nonetheless get a clear picture of the world’s surfing habits by surveying global website rankings. Currently, of the world’s 16 most popular online destinations, 10 are English-language websites. They are:

1.Yahoo
2. MSN
3. Google
4. MySpace
5. YouTube
6. Orkut
7. Windows Live
8. Wikipedia
9. eBay
10. Blogger

In other words the top 10 sites are:

1. Search engine
2. Microsoft portal
3. Search engine
4. music-themed community site driven by user-generated content
5. video-themed community site driven by user-generated content
6. dating-themed community site driven by user-generated content
7. search engine
8. encyclopedia-themed site driven by user-generated content
9. auction-themed community site driven by user-generated content
10. blog-themed community site driven by user-generated content

If anyone still has doubts about the power of user-generated content, I think this data speaks for itself.