ETech: Hitwise Site Picks

Bill Tancer just revealed his picks for the next four up and coming Web 2.0 sites. Not surprisingly, they are all media-sharing sites.

How did Bill make this prediction? He checked what demographics first went to popular Web 2.0 sites like YouTube and Del.icio.us. One of the early-adopting demographics are The Young Digerati; "they are affluent urbanites, they shop at Banana Republic and Nordstrom, drive luxury import cars, and are likely to spend money on technical gadgets and wireless technology" (from Bill's blog). The other are known as Money and Brains; they are "consumers have high incomes, advanced degrees and sophisticated tastes" (from The 360).

Bill revealed to us what the latest sites were that had the same appeal to Money and Brains. Here are the companies, listed in order:

Imeem - A media site that enables sharing of videos, photos, and blogs while connecting fans and artists.

Metacafe - A video-sharing site with complimentary desktop application for avid downloaders. High-rated user-submitted videos that become popular can earn the creators money (direct from Metacafe); the leader board shows the top earners on the homepage (current top earner has ~26K. Trivia: Metacafe is currently the 7th most popular blog according to Technorati and is unclaimed.

Veoh - A video-sharing site that also has a P2P application for getting high-resolution video clips. Based in San Diego, their founder Dimitry Shapiro, spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit last year.

Wikimedia Commons - The site describes itself as "a database of 1,284,954 media files to which anyone can contribute". Like the Wikipedia it is run by volunteers, uses MediaWiki as a platfom, and it is a part of the Wikimedia Foundation.

As you can see from the Google Trends graph above, the search data for Metacafe and Imeem validate BIll's picks. Veoh seems to be on a plateau and Wikimedia Commons doesn't even show up. Interesting to see the discrepancies between web and search traffic.