The US market share of Q&A site traffic grew a whopping 118% last year, according to a new report by Hitwise. Yahoo! Answers is far and away the leader of the answer sites, with 74.5% of the US market.
But other answer sites are slowly but surely gaining ground. WikiAnswers came in second with 18.5%, while AnswerBag came in at 4.51%, though that was still an 83% gain over last year. Ask MetaFilter remained around the same at 1.80%, but Askville got a 316% increase, though they came in at only 0.85%.
Hitwise Research Director, Heather Dougherty, had this to say about the trend: “Online users are increasingly seeking advice from question and answer websites that leverage shared knowledge contributed across a community of experts and enthusiasts. The popularity of user generated media has helped to establish a category for social knowledge where consumers can obtain answers from a single aggregated source developed through others asking similar questions.”