If you imagine that Internet years are like dog years (ie one is like seven human years), then looking at how the Internet has changed since 2003 is like looking at half a lifetime.
That's what metrics firm Nielsen has done with its report on the Global Online Media Landscape...'Global' meaning around a dozen countries, including the US, UK, Australia, France and Germany. It makes a number of different points (download from here), so I'll restrict myself to three take-outs, and compare where appropriate with other recent research:
1 - Online video not about to replace TV
More people than ever are watching online video, and as far back as November 2007, the online video audience passed the 'email audience.' But saying lots of people go to You Tube et al, isn't the same as saying lots of people are spending all day on there.
In the US for example, Nielsen says the average US daily use is "only" six minutes a day (Comscore measures it at just over 10 minutes - and over 15 minutes for the UK). I'd say that's not necessarily a big surprise:
One report from Tube Mogul showed that most people stop watching online videos after the first minute. And another showed that most web TV series lose most viewers after episode one. The Internet is a place to watch Susan Boyle clips, and send them to your friends. For most people anyway, the TV (or PC via DVD), is still the place to watch feature length films.
As we said in our recent print media report, whatever its recession-led advertising woes, unlike print, TV is actually holding its own fairly well in terms of consumer attention.
2 - It's all about me (...and my friends)
A report that I'm working on at the moment is around the theme "what is your website good for?", linking into the fact that social media means consumers are less interested in going to (ultimately sales focused) brand websites.
February 2009 was the point when, according to Nielsen, "member community" time online passed email time online. It's something that certainly rings true and I am sure a lot of people reading this will have made more use of Twitter and Linked In's messaging systems to contact people for business reasons.
Personalisation trumps ubiquity.
Or as Nielsen analyst Charlie Buchwalter says: "The Internet has changed dramatically as people seek more personalized relationships online. Today users gravitate to sites that contain more and more specialized content."
In fact, social media participation stands at 69% of UK and 67% of US Internet consumers.
3 - For the mobile Internet, it's still 2003
Mobile Internet use is still a minority pursuit, with UK mobile penetration being 17% (18% for the US), but just like social media in the middle of the decade, we're on the threshold of something much bigger.
Though the numbers of people using it are not huge as a proportion of all smartphone users, Nielsen says that Apple's iPhone takes a lot of the credit in having a 'halo effect' on the rest of the sector:
"iPhone users, for instance, are more than four times as likely as a typical subscriber to use mobile Internet, six times as likely to use mobile applications and six times as likely to consume mobile."
Put simply, it's also forced other mobile handset makers to up their game and play catch up.
Then, in a throw back to earlier in the decade, mobile data plans are finally becoming more affordable and 3G networks more or less standard. The development of 3G in fact reminds me of the first "faster" home Internet connections. Still slow, and patchy, but a huge improvement on what was there before.
The second and third points are also linked - smartphones work just fine if you want to update your Twitter feed or see what your Facebook friends are up to.
So how do you make money from the damn thing?
Nielsen, having blue chip clients who put money into Internet advertising, not surprisingly puts a relatively rosy glow on the sector.
Though it admits that the recession has taken its toll, it also says that: "It is notable that several industries are significantly stepping up their involvement with the online mediumâ€"including industries that consistently led spending in traditional advertising over the last 30 years."
CEO John Burbank does point out that most online advertising is pretty poor and has next to no recall, stating: "Want a firsthand lesson in the health of the Internet? Ask a friend a simple question: "What's your favorite online ad?"
And on that note, BBH Labs produced its list of reasons why many online campaigns are underwhelming.One is an obsession on here and now ROI, driven by clients who are being told to justify what they are doing by their internal clients, which ties into the John Barham quote of:
"In business we tend to value most highly that which we can measure most precisely." This leads to "a disparity in budget allocation between offline & online worlds, suggestive of a pervasive disparity in value in clients' eyes, perhaps."
But as Augustine Fou said in his recent ClickZ article, "the ROI of social media is zero" or rather you can't just shift the traditional marketing numbers game online.
Though I have a vested interest in saying this - I wonder whether interruptive advertising will ever really work online. After all, 98% of online ads have never been clicked. And as P&G's head of interactive, Ted McConnell said last year, social media is not "media":
"Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren't trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. ... We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it."
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- Report: We're spending more time with online social media, video (seattlepi.com)
- Online video ads put message into the medium (guardian.co.uk)
- Facebook Twice as Big as MySpace? (marketingpilgrim.com)
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