To be clear, my point is that people are flocking to these article-based web sites so there must be something there beyond just being text on the web. The traf

To be clear, my point is that people are flocking to these article-based web sites so there must be something there beyond just being text on the web. The traffic has been growing. At HubPages, we were at 8 million unique visitors in Nov, 2008 and now we are approaching 14 million unique visitors in Aug, 2009. I would argue that these article-based sites are popular because of the web tools available on them, the community of writers and readers to interact with, and the growing traffic. People want these types of places to add their information. Sure, they could open a blog account by itself or write anonymously on Wikipedia but it's not the same. Scribd seemed to be the first of these sites to go mainstream. That was my main point to your question. If there's nothing there, what accounted for Scribd's popularity? It took me a long time to understand why Twitter was an improvement over RSS. Sometimes, these trends are not obvious until you have the experience of participating with the web site that is growing in popularity. I hope that better explains my original point.