Citysearch.com Traffic up 185% Over Last Year. Huh?

There is an interesting story on WashingtonPost.com today about where Internet traffic is growing and slowing.

No surprise - traffic to blogging and social networking sites has skyrocketed. Blogger.com traffic is up 528% year over year and traffic to MySpace.com is up 318%. Guess Rupert's $580 million gamble might be paying off...

Other interesting tidbits include traffic increases to Wikipedia.org (up 275%). I'll be interested to see if wiki traffic begins to cannibalize blog traffic and/or if we'll see a traffic plateau in the entire social networking arena. (I wrote about this topic on the PersonalizedMediaBlog.com last week.)

Google saw 21% growth, but Yahoo, MSN and AOL all saw relatively flat growth, under 5% each. eBay actually saw a 3% traffic drop. Interesting. Guess all those people doing auctions are now blogging and chatting up on MySpace.com... (Not really, remember that eBay still gets millions of visits a day.)

The most interesting part of the story for me was the Citysearch number. Most local Internet sites closed their doors during the Internet bubble bust. Citysearch was on life support. But there seems to be growth in local-oriented online content. Perhaps this has something to do with the emergence of local news video online (accessible in part because the majority of online Americans now have broadband). Perhaps there is a renewed focus on real community content (to complement online communities). I'll tell you - this is a very interesting stat. It will be interesting to see if this is just an anomoly, if it's just a Citysearch thing, or if we'll see more growth in local-oriented online content. If so, it will prove the point that the online communities are becoming an integral part of our entire culture and that the distinction between online and "live" is narrowing.

Check the story out here. ComScore actually provides some pretty detailed data.

-aB