Interesting stats
Universal McCann has written a couple of insightful reports with some interesting stats.
This from the Wave3 report published March 08:
Australia – Blog readership for on-line users has grown from 21% to 62%, an estimated 3.3 million blog readers in this country.
Globally Blog readership has grown to 54% to 77%. An estimated 346 million people.
The time period for this growth was from September 2006 to March 2008
If you’re not getting involved, why not?
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Great chart. Video is really the rising star isn’t it.
I wish it also had information on people’s activities with other online media: specifically for me I’d love to see web gaming and interactive media such as flash ads somehow included in the chart. Casual gaming on the web is massive amongst lots of people although its largely an ignored phenomena and few people admit to wasting time on flash games, etc.
I’m focussed on a new online industry: virtual worlds. Specifically lightweight highly interactive ones. They don’t sound important yet but I believe we will be talking of them in two years the way we started talking about video 3 years ago.
What will happen when you can embed virtual worlds just like videos in web pages? They will be higher quality than previous generations that were not immersive and were hard work to use. These new virtual worlds will be able to be used for gaming, remote product demonstrations, training, etc. It may sound fringe today but the big players such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, Intel are now getting solidly involved and major work is going on behind the scenes.
The reason for my post is how do we chart the break out potential of interactive media/virtual worlds? I think the reason video has been the rising star as it gives us the lean back experience of TV where we get an excellent ratio of information or entertainment per second as a viewer. Clips tend to be short to suit our attention span and the subject matter is tagged and crowd sourced. That’s why it’s so successful. It ends up going beyond what we’ve had with TV (although it still fails on quality, screen size and some convenience based measurements).
Ultimately in people’s homes lots of people consume and interact with media by spending time watching TV, playing video games and surfing the web. The first two (watching TV and playing video games) are both great for doing with others. Surfing the web is generally a less social experience. As the first of those has gone online it has become the rising star on the graph. Can the second of the two (playing video games) have a similar though perhaps slower trajectory?
The need for remote interaction is never higher with travel costs on our pockets and the environment but still it’s a big hop to believe we can skip face to face meetings. One thing I know is the technology to deliver highly interactive virtual worlds into web pages is going to come of age in 2009 and so hopefully 2010 will prove a breakout year where we see it hit the graph and to take off.
Blizzard just announced World of Warcraft hitting 11 million subscribers and given the amount of in-game banter and level of engagement it is going to be amazing to watch how social media evolves as the tools you talk about become more widely dispersed and easier to use.
What you mention about remote interaction etc points to even more dispersed communications than we have now and I wonder how all of this bodes for old broadcast models – if we’re interacting in a virtual space I’m not going to tolerate interruption marketing. Will it be branded ’spaces’?