Pew: Portals Most Commonly Used News Sites

The Pew Internet project has just released a lengthy report on online news consumption entitled Understanding the Participatory News Consumer. There are no search-specific findings; however it appears from the survey data that “portal websites like Google News, AOL and Topix are the most commonly used online news sources, visited by over half of online news users on a typical day.”
Here are some of the high-level findings from [...]

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Ow! Ow! Google Brain Freeze!

Ow, brain freeze! Brain freeze!

You know that sensation. It usually accompanies the consumption of too much of a good thing, such as ice cream, milkshakes, or…Google updates?!?

Yeah, apparently we’re at that time of the year when Google initiates its own “brain” freeze–effectively shutting down innovation until the New Year. Writes TechCrunch…

…people at Google are still working, but apparently Google has a “code freeze” policy that goes in place sometime in December. If you don’t get your product/service out the door by then, it gets pushed til when the freeze is lifted, likely sometime in the new year. A few Googlers confirmed this policy off-the-record, but all seemed concerned about publicly acknowledging it.

It certainly makes sense–based on the recent flurry of new Google updates–but I’m not entirely convinced that we won’t see any updates over the next 4 weeks. All it would take is some big announcement from Microsoft, and Google will be just a matter of hours behind it–with its own announcement.

You can take that to the bank!

Nielsen to Measure Online TV Audience

Nielsen has been measuring television audiences for decades. Now online TV is starting to take over—but do we have accurate measurement of the online TV audience?

comScore and other online measurement companies are watching videos—I mean, online video audiences—grow and grow. Now Nielsen will use a new “Internet Meter” with its People Meter families to measure online as well as offline TV consumption.

The Internet Meter will measure the “extended screen”—online television from cable companies, such as OnDemand Online from Comcast and TV Everywhere from Time Warner. This type of viewing may have slipped past online measurement companies looking at web-based TV, like from Hulu. Nielsen has worked in online measurement as well, though they don’t say if they’ll be combining Hulu numbers with the online cable numbers.

According to Read Write Web, Hulu has tended to prefer comScore’s measures of its audience, since comScore’s numbers have shown a higher viewership than Nielsen’s. Online measurement is notoriously tricky in this area, since there aren’t set industry standards on how to count audiences, and as always, there can be sampling biases.

RWW says that the Internet Meter might combat inherent problems in sampling—but the Internet Meter will be based on the same statistical principles, which are fairly sound. (Yeah, I know, it doesn’t seem like a small number of people can accurately predict the habits of the general population, and a larger sample usually yields more accurate data, but if people are truly chosen at random, a small sample has a 90-95% chance of accurately reflecting the population, depending on how they do their calculations. </AP stats lesson>)

What do you think? Will this make a difference to online television? Will it affect ad prices online?

One Third of Internet Videos Are Shared

Just in case there was any doubt that online video is more popular than ever, a new study says that one third of all videos are shared online. Yahoo, market research firm Interpret LLC, Warner Bros. Media Research, Havas Digital, and Omnicom’s PHD collaborated for the survey results, to be released today.

We marketers should be especially excited about the results from the survey. Ads on television, it appears, were twice as likely to be ignored as online ads. 28% admitted they were more likely to pay attention to online advertising. Engagement was also high—leading to increased satisfaction for users, brand recall for advertisers and tendency to seek product information for consumers.

In fact, after viewing videos they deemed “high engagement,” more than one in four respondents searched for more information about a product (27%) or visited the brand website (28%). Low-engagement videos prompted only 13% to research more and only 10% to visit the brand website.

Plus, video viewers spend 32% of their total time online watching video. Seven in ten of the respondents watched videos online at home and at work. Video consumption verified this, peaking for men, women, students and full-time employees during the hours of noon and 3 PM and 9 PM and 1 AM. The low point came at 6 PM and 9 PM.

The survey was conducted with 2024 broadband Internet users, aged 13 to 54, who’d watched an online video in the last 24 hours.

What do you think? Do you research a product after a high engagement video? What videos would you give as examples of high engagement?

People Watch Boatloads of Online Video

Thank you to Carol Bartz of Yahoo for the new ‘boatloads’ theme. What would we do without it? Back to the news. Of course, we know that lots of people watch online video and SearchEngineWatch tells of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project survey conducted in April of this year and the numbers behind the general statement about online video are pretty interesting. As with any research it’s good to know the source and the group studied so here’s the skinny on the research methodology

The report is based on the findings of a daily tracking survey on Americans’ use of the Internet. The results are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research International between March 26 to April 19, 2009, among a sample of 2,253 adults, 18 and older.

Now for some numbers:

• The number of people using video sharing sites has gone from 33% in 2006 to 62% in 2009
• 89 percent of internet users ages 18-29 now say they watch content on video sharing sites, and 36 percent do so on a typical day
• 46 percent of adult internet users are active on social networking sites, which makes the 62% number for video more impressive. How the research defines social networking sites of course impacts this because YouTube can be clumped in there quite readily.
• Evidence of some possible alternative definitions of social networking sites can be found by the statement that 11 percent use status updating sites like Twitter. Normally Twitter is part of social networking but to have it peeled off under the category of “status updating” site is kind of odd. What’s Facebook then a “What’s on your mind?” site vs. a social networking site?

As with any research we need to take it with a grain of salt. Online video consumption will need to be watched based on age more than any other measurement. The 30 and under (specifically 18-29 years old) set registers an 89% of Internet users having used a video sharing site and 36% doing so daily. My response is for these folks to maybe exercise their bodies as well as their eyes but that’s just me.

So what are your video habits? Do you have to see the latest stupid human trick on YouTube or else your day is not complete? Do you turn to video for product information regularly? While it’s interesting to know the total numbers what is more informative is the specific types of video consumed on these sites and how Internet marketers can take advantage of these habits. Tell us your deepest, darkest online video habits but please keep it in the realm of ‘family viewing’. No one really wants to know everything you watch online .

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Report: How The Internet Has Changed Music Consumption

Music file sharing services have always been a mutant species of search, offering different tools and methods for finding and listening to tunes. Napster was one of the first and most infamous, and its widespread adoption caused the recording industry to panic, suing both the company and thousands of its users. That hasn’t stopped the [...]

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