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A tiny 0.16 per cent of visits to Google's YouTube, the top video-sharing site, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise.

Similarly, only 0.2 per cent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo!, are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found.

The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation's couch potatoes - voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer's statistics show.

Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit online encyclopaedia, is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study: 4.6 per cent of all visits

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to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site.

But despite relatively low-user involvement, visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668 per cent in two years, Tancer said.

'Web 2.0 and participatory sites are really gaining traction,' he told an audience of roughly 3,000 Internet entrepreneurs, developers and financiers attending the Web 2.0 Expo industry conference in San Francisco this week.

Web 2.0, a phrase popularised by conference organiser Tim O'Reilly, refers to websites that seek to turn viewers into contributors by giving them tools to write, post, comment and upload their own creative work.

Besides Wikipedia, other well-known Web 2.0 destinations are social networking sites like News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook and photo-sharing site Photobucket.

Visits by Web users to the category of participatory Web 2.0 sites account for 12 per cent of US Web activity, up from only two per cent two years ago, the study showed.

Web 2.0 photo-sharing sites now account for 56 per cent of visits to all online photo sites. Of that, Photobucket alone accounts for 41 per cent of the traffic, Hitwise data shows.

An older, first generation of sites, now in the minority, are photo-finishing sites that give users the ability to store, share and print photos.