Message From Michael -- July 21, 2008

DIGITAL DROP-OUTS

AND THE WORD IS -- DOOMED

AND THE WINNER IS --- DANG.

AND THE WINNER IS – DEPENDS.

AND THE ONE TO WATCH IS

MEDIA GORILLA FOLLOW-UP


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DIGITAL DROP-OUTS: You hear so much about the Web and new media that it’s sometimes easy to think everybody is Internet inclined. Not so, according to a report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The focus of the report was on broadband adoption. Yes, indeed it is up – some 55% of adult Americans now have broadband Internet connections. That’s a 17% increase year to year. And interestingly, monthly broadband bills are actually lower (by 4%) this year than three years ago in 2005. Broadband Internet penetration among upper-income Americans is reaching the “saturation” point at 85%. Low-income Americans actually showed a drop, or were flat, year to year in terms of broadband adoption. Older Americans are adopting broadband at a slightly higher rate than the average. Some of this you may have already heard about. But how about dial-up users. They still make up about 10% of the Internet world. Some don’t have it for economic or access reasons, although nearly two-thirds (60%) say they just aren’t interested in broadband. Then there are the non-Internet users. More than a quarter (27%) of adults in the United States just don’t use the Internet. Age and income are two factors. Still, the report notes that a third (33%) of these non-Internet users simply are not interested with another 9% saying it’s just too difficult or frustrating and another 7% seeing it as “a waste of time.”

As a side note to this, there is a website (digitaldivide.net) that is focused on bridging the divide in digitaldom between the have’s and have not’s – a problem “painstakingly clear” in developing countries but existent also in North America. The organizers of the Digital Divide Network say, “there is a moral imperative to ensure that everyone has equal access to information technology.”

AND THE WORD IS: Doomed, if you don’t start now. That’s the underlying message in a report issued by market research firm Borrell Associates on local web revenues. Although I’ve reported on it before, noting that the report warned that Internet ‘pure-plays’ could “gobble up” local advertising revenue, a second reading proved even scarier. (Yes, I need a life, but it really is worthwhile to review these things a second time sometimes.) The report predicts (or warns, if you prefer) that by 2012, that there will be ‘winners’ in LOCAL online advertising and whoever that winner is, will be “the second or third largest media outlets in their markets in terms of total revenues.” And right now, newspapers have a formidable lead and the biggest head start. Borrell projects total LOCAL (let me emphasize that word again) online ad spending to hit $13.1 Billion this year, up from $8.7 Billion last year. Of that amount, local newspapers will score $3.7 Billion this year, local TV stations $1.2 Billion and local radio stations $255 Million. I know many of my MfM readers are math impaired, so let me point out something. You add up all three sectors and you come up with roughly $5.1 Billion. Subtract that from the $13.1 Billion, and you are $8 Billion short. Guess who’s getting that? You guessed it. The Internet pure plays – Google, Yahoo along with places like Craigslist.

AND THE WINNER IS: Danged if I know. Two separate reports, but both citing data from Hitwise research, show different winners for top U.S. broadcast network sites. One cites PBS.org as the leading site with a quarter of all visits (24.23%). The other cites ABC.com as the winner with a quarter of the visits (26.94%). Interestingly the report citing ABC does not even include PBS in the mix, and that may explain the difference. Plus they are for separate weeks. The reports are consistent in that CBS, NBC and Fox are in a dead heat, with less than a percentage point separating them in both reports. They are also consistent in that the CW gets only a quarter of the visits the other networks get while the MyNetworkTV site gets less than a single percentage point. In the report with the PBS numbers, ABC comes in second (19.35%). That report by Julieanne Smolinski at TVWeek says PBS beat the others in total U.S. visits in part because of video usage online while another report cites the website redesign and a search engine optimization effort.

AND THE WINNER IS: Depends. Month to month, week to week, the honors for top news website will vary among the top three: Yahoo News, CNN, and MSNBC. They all hover around 35 Million unique visitors a month, but CNN usually beats the other two by ten minutes or more in terms of time spent online. Its visitors average a half hour or more at a time. The other two are in the 20-minute-plus range. After the top three, the battle is between AOL and the New York Times, with the number of visitors a month dropping significantly to a little over 20 Million visitors a month. But both do average about half an hour in time spent. Rounding out the top ten in varying order, depending on the week or month, are Tribune group, Gannett, ABC News, Google News, Fox and some times USA Today. Interestingly (as I always say -- at least to me), Yahoo News averages three times as many visitors as Google News (an average of 30-plus Million unique visitors compared to Google’s 11 Million) and usually twice as much time spent by its visitors (an average of 20-plus minutes compared to Google’s 12 minutes.) Considering the previous article, I should note that NPR averages about 3.7 Million unique visitors to its site and they spend an average of six to seven minutes. Lastly, in further proof that I need to get a life, I averaged the amount of time spent online at these various websites. The average time spent was 9 minutes and 49 seconds while the median for time spent was 13 minutes and 30 seconds. I give that, because it gives you something to compare with the time spent on your website.

AND THE ONE TO WATCH IS: Actually there are ten to watch. Ten web startups that Technology Review says are worth watching. In keeping with websites nowadays, they all have some weird names, but not so weird potential. My two favorites help turn everyone into a reporter (not a journalist, just a reporter) on the scene. Qik lets you capture audio and video and stream it in real time to its website and from there to any other platforms. In essence you can broadcast live from your phone. Ushahidi is the Swahili word for “testimony” and is the name of an application developed during Kenya’s chaotic and deadly presidential election last December. It picks up text messages from any mobile phone and displays them on a Google Maps application to track trouble spots. The founder says it can be used in any crisis situation, such as the Katrina disaster, to track problems. A third website is a kind of traffic reporter. Dash Navigation is a two-way Internet-connected traffic network that employs traffic data but then also tracks users’ cars through GPS data to help deal with traffic jams. Others include Pinger which describes itself as “noninterruptive voice mail” – you record a voice message on the Pinger server and it sends out a text message to the recipient telling them they have a message to pick up. Pownce allows you to send and receive large multimedia files to specific people. As the review put it, think Twitter meets Napster. QTech is a sort of electronic post it note which generates reminders about everything from meetings to grocery lists via phone, text message, RSS feed, e-mail or Web interface. 33Across uses self-provided information and Web browsing to find out who are the “viral promoters” who influence the buying of products. Peer39 is a semantic-advertising company whose algorithms help customize advertising messages to a very detailed level based on blogs, social networks, forums and Web page use. Mashery, as its name implies, allows a sort of mash-up of Websites, letting them talk to each other using API’s (application programming interfaces). Anagran uses technology to prescreen data so that it can tell which packets are which (packets are those little bits that all Internet info is broken into); and then it prioritizes their sending.

MEDIA GORILLA FOLLOW-UP: It almost invariably happens. After I send out an MfM, I find new information or information I forgot to put in. In last week’s MfM about TV as the dominant medium, I left out the latest Nielsen numbers on TV viewing, which has hit an all-time high. Americans watch an average of 127 hours and 15 minutes of TV a month. That’s up from 121 hours and 48 minutes last year. Americans also spend 26 hours and 26 minutes a month in front of their computers. Two hours and 19 minutes of that time is spent watching online video.

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