Delivering the keynote lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Newscorp Europe and Asia boss James Murdoch came out with a good soundbite, namely that we have "analogue attitudes in a digital age." Murdoch was obviously talking about TV and his speech involved taking aim at the publicly funded BBC in particular, but it's a nice line to describe a lot of what goes on in this space. Take our continued obsession with the big number for example.
Exhibit A, the other day Comscore released its latest Twitter stats. 'Twitter more popular than the BBC!' said Netimperative and TechRadar. But, as I said on my home blog, saying you have 50 million monthly visitors is not the same as saying you have 50 million users.
First you have to take away the duplicate accounts (for example I have registered four IDs, only two of which are active). And on that note, you then have to subtract the number that register but never participate - according to Hubspot 54.9% of tweeple have never tweeted, and I don't buy the line that 'they are all listening.'
Then you have to look at the % of power tweeple, the people who really do use it, and (according to Sysmos) you are left with 5% of the total. So just over 2.5 million.
'Oh well, waste of time, very few people do use it then' will say the nay-sayers (of which there are plenty), but the whole point is that looking at the raw number is completely pointless. What's important is who they are and what they do.
Exhibit B - I've fallen into this particular trap of proclaiming that newspapers are more popular than ever thanks to the Internet.
Again - sure the basic stats show that the Guardian online gets a huge audience compared to the web edition....yet (assuming I care about UK consumers only), a high proportion of that audience comes from abroad. And stats from Columbia Journalism Review show that 88% of newspaper reading time is in print, while Malcom Coles in the Online Journalism blog figured out that most online newspaper readers only look at one page.
The comparison is therefore completely artificial due to the fact that the way we read online and print is completely different.
Exhibit C - The other day there was chatter that 'RSS' might be 'dead.' Why? Asks Patricio Robles of eConsultancy. "RSS may not be as popular as Twitter or Facebook but who says it has to be?...not every technology has to achieve 90%+ adoption to be useful."
The fact is we're taking an offline metrics way of thinking and hauling it online. It doesn't work that way. And the problem with using the big number is that it's very easy to puncture it.
Exhibit D, Twitter has in the past been unfavourably compared to the virtual world Second Life in terms of hype, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly. The point is though that Second Life also in its heyday suffered from large user numbers being banded about.
In mid 2007 there was talk of 10-15 million Second Life residents...completely untrue when you took out duplicate accounts, people who registered but never came back...sound familiar? That number was so over inflated that it was easy to puncture, sparking a debate about the 'real' number of users (I gather it's currently about 750k human beings).
Analogue thinking is that we like to see a big number so that we (in marketing) can tick a box and say 'job done, I reached X many people.' Digital thinking is we put the big number to one side and instead look at two things that are more important: Engagement (does anyone care enough to pass it on) and influence (who exactly are we reaching?)
Or as Norwegian brand strategist Helge Tenno says his latest blog post "traditional media is a battle between stories...in social media, we are not engaging in stories, we are engaging in the exchange of ideas." Two completely different things. As Kevin Slavin (quoted in Helge's post) puts it:
"The relationship between media and social media is like the relationship between egg and eggplant. They share a couple of the same letters, but they are not in the same taxonomy."
no comments
Paidcontent summarises the latest ABC newspaper circulation figures from the UK (US and Australian comparisons follow below) in a single paragraph. All you need to know, says Paidcontent's Patrick Smith, is that 465,895 less national newspaper copies were being sold - and given away - in July 2009 compared to July 2008.
If we work on the principle of 2-3 readers per paper that would mean at least a million people - the equivalent to the population of Birmignham - have stopped reading a national newspaper over the past year. If you added in regionals, the figure would almost certainly be much higher with Enders Analysis telling the House of Commons culture, media and sports committee that 50% of regional papers are at risk of closure in the next five years.
In the US, the equivalent of Wisconsin has stopped reading papers
The last US figures I could find were the ABC ones that came out at the end of April (I believe new ones are out soon). Daily average circulation for 395 US newspapers dropped from 37.1 million in March 2008 to 34.4 million this year, so a total loss of 2.7 million sales. Again, if we apply the parallel above, that means 5.5+ million plus US readers have deserted the industry - call it the equivalent of a medium sized (in population) US State like Wisconsin.
Better news from Australia
The latest ABC figures from Australia imply that the country is bucking the trend. Sales of all daily newspapers in Australia stand at 20.9 million, down only 0.7%. However, national newspapers fared worse showing a drop of 3.4% on weekdays.Commenting in The Australian, Steve Allen of Fusion Strategy said that "the trend line for newspapers in Australia (is) really probably the best in the world."
Is the news getting less bad?
At the same time, it's worth paying attention to some media commentators who are predicting that the slump in the newspaper market may be bottoming out - at least in the US. Borrell Associates predicts a rebound in newspaper advertising next year, however to put that into context, even in 2014 predicted newspaper advertising ($30 billion) will still be far below the $55 billion the industry managed earlier this decade.
Like a number of other pundits in this space, Borrell Associates doesn't feel that newspapers are dead, just that their future is to be leaner and "more interesting, more relative to their audiences" - a view I share.
So the overall trend is still very much in one direction as newspapers battle for a future in a digital world, but it is a process of evolution rather than a today / tomorrow thing. After all, 88% of newspaper reading time is still in print and not online.
Image - Birmingham, UK, by Paul Tomlins
1 comment(s)
An interesting report by Transpera (via Marketing Charts) conducted in the US shows: Once someone starts graduating onto mobile video with their phone, they are hooked and use it as the main way to go online.
According to the results, 62% of mobile video users use their mobile/cellphones to browse the Internet more than they use their computers. Meanwhile, 58% of mobile video watchers get more of their news from their phones than from any other source.
To me those are fairly significant stats. It shows that the line 'build it and they will come', does hold true here. After years of the mobile Internet being hyped to high heaven, people really will start using their tiny iPhone / Palm Pre screen et al more than their computer, provided (as is the case with the iPhone and its ilk), the user experience is rich enough.
Of course, the overall mobile video audience is still relatively small but it's growing as smartphone use becomes more prevalent. According to an Allot Communications study published at the end of June, "http streaming" (ie watching You Tube, Hulu etc on your phone) now accounts for 21% of mobile data traffic worldwide - see chart below.
Overall, Allot Communications (download the full report here), found that global mobile data bandwidth use increased by 30% worldwide in Q2 2009.
Dirk Singer
Blogging for:
Member since: 29 Apr 2009
Last login: 21 Nov 2009
Total Posts: 21
