News to light recently from YouTube is that (in the company's words) the YouTube Generation 'looks like us'.

After what's termed the 'first comprehensive survey of Australian YouTube users' that numbered over 3,000 users, the stats reveal a demographic closely aligned with that of the basic number of Australians of certain age, working, married, etc.

The conclusion? We're all YouTube users no matter our gender, lifestyle or socioeconomic status. Not so much 'Australian all use YouTube' but Australian YouTube users come from all walks of life.

79 percent say they stay on the website longer than they intend, which isn't surprising. I was going to christen the phenomenon the YouTube Effect but I'm sure there's a sociological term for it somewhere already, maybe the Sims Effect or the Google Earth Effect or even the Browsing Effect circa 1997.

More unexpectedly, 2 out of 3 visitors to the site do more than just watch videos, a curious number to say the least. The first reaction of most would be 'is there anything else to do on YouTube?' Maybe they're the people who upload content as well as just watch it. At two thirds, it probably means YouTube has a very dedicated hardcore user base that exploits it to its full rather than just watch a few clips of the eastern Australian dust storms like many of us.

But the most interesting factoid that struck me was way down in the press release. 51 percent of visitors watch music videos, with user-generated content only 27 percent, not even as many as the second placeholder, movie trailers.

So the biggest slice of the pie (just over half) in the most famous tool of the Web 2.0 movement goes to traditional big media – music publishers, in this case.

Is it too harsh to say YouTube was supposed to be the part of the grand democratisation of the web and it's just another TV channel? Maybe. But it got me thinking about just how user generated content is because of this revealing statistic.

If the old media empires are good at anything, it's – as the name suggests – media. They're about getting products seen, and they don't care how. Maybe they're not too concerned with owning the delivery platforms, and thankfully so considering their profit margins of late.

But commercial media players are only too please to participate in (hijack?) social media to any extent they can, especially as it's where most of generation Y are looking now as they turn away from network TV and radio in droves.

For those of us in the technology reporting field, we've seen the rapid rise of vendors and their publicity agencies using Facebook, Flickr and now Twitter. Not only are they trying to spruik to us using the channels they know we use but they're often trying to take advantage of the informal nature of those media to look like our OMG BFF, hoping it will give them exponential leaps forward establishing media relationships.

I'm not suggesting a conspiracy. The punters will watch what they want to watch, and if music videos and movie clips are all there on instant recall and that's what interests people, that's what they'll use. You'd expect more people to watch Robert Pattinson chastely court a swooning Kirsten Stewart than the 'ch-chk boom' girl.

I just think it's worth keeping the question at the forefront of our collective minds; how vigilant do we have to be to keep social media social – particularly when so many social media platforms are the same old The Man who prints our daily paper?