A new survey released by Web audience measurement firm Hitwise has shown an interesting new spin on the recent Web 2.0 hype - it seems this new generation of web maestros are less creatives, and more voyeurs - with the trend being far less participatory than commonly assumed.The vast majority of visitors to these sites (likened to the traditional 'couch potato') are voyeurs who like to watch rather than create.

A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch. Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the in depth study showed. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia edited by 'Joe Public', is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study, with 4.6 percent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site. However, despite relatively low-user involvement, visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668 percent in two years.