40.8 Million Germans Online 2.4 Million Are Editing The Wikipedia

Following up on 25 Million Germans Buy Online and Germans Will Spend 145 Billion Euro Online In 2010 a recent study of public television network ARD/ZDF (ARD/ZDF-Onlinestudie 2007 – pdf in German) provides some interesting data points on how and how many Germans use the web:

40.8 million Germans above the age of 14 have access to the internet in 2007, coming from 38.6 million in 2006. It is – surprise, surprise – mostly (72%) used for informational purposes.

But most Germans already use web 2.0-ish services as well (albeit without knowing the term Web 2.0 – about 15% do so – as another study recently suggested, which of course does not matter at all): the most popular site is the Wikipedia, which is used by 47% of Germans followed by various video sharing sites with 34%.

It is interesting that they try to play down the impact of these sites stating:

Certainly it’s mostly passive consumption of content and not active contribution by the users themselves. … Only 6% already have written an article for Wikipedia, 7% have uploaded a movie to a video sharing site and 2% created an avatar in a virtual world like Second Life

Give me a break. YouTube and Wikipedia rank 5 and 6 in Germany according to Alexa following only Google.de, Ebay, Google.com again and Yahoo. It is actually hard not to see that 2.4 million people contributing to the Wikipedia and 2.8 million people creating and uploading videos to YouTube et al. don’t constitute a major shift in media creation and distribution.

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)