Demographics

The Online Media Landscape in 2009

Posted in Youth Culture Research on May 20th, 2009

Filed Under: data, Dave Knox, Demographics, hard knox life, mobile, mobile campaign, mobile marketing, Nielsen Report, Online Media, Social Media, Youth Marketing Data

Many hearty thanks are owed to Dave Knox of Hard Knox Life for compiling a genuinely must-read post.  Using reams of data taken from the Nielsen Global Online Media Landscape, Dave paints an empirical picture of the future of online media.  If you’re in the interactive marketing space like YMC is, it’s full of some pretty interesting numbers.  The post — and the Nielsen Report — are certainly worth reading in their entirely.  But here are the key take-aways as I see them: marketers need to ready themselves for integrating mobile, digital and physical media.  In this brave-new-world, it’s going to take all three, working in tandem.

Digital Content / Online Video are among the fastest growing areas of the Online Media Landscape:

• The number of American users frequenting online video destinations has climbed 339 percent since 2003.
• Time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2,000 percent over the same period.
• In the last year alone, unique viewers of online video grew 10 percent, the number of streams grew 41 percent, the streams per user grew 27 percent and the total minutes engaged with online video grew 71 percent.
• One of the more interesting trends in online video is the increasing attraction to long form videos: the total minutes spent watching long-form (average of six-to-eight minutes) is considerably more than minutes spent on short-form, and has grown about 20% in the first two months of 2009.

Mobile is finally taking its rightful place in the spotlight:

• In the U.S. today, nearly 50 million mobile subscribers access the Web via their devices on a monthly basis. In the U.S., the mobile Internet audience grew 74% between February 2007 and February 2009.
• While historically US has been behind in mobile adoption, the US is now one of the leading markets for mobile Internet penetration, with more than 18% of subscribers accessing mobile Web.  This is the highest penetration of mobile subscribers among the markets Nielsen reports mobile Internet adoption.
• Penetration of smartphones doubled between Q4 2007 and Q4 2008, from 7% of U.S. mobile subscribers to 14%. Penetration of faster 3G devices now stands at 37% of handsets in use in the U.S
• iPhone users are unique in their use – a hint at the mobile media behaviors of users of next-gen phones to come.  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 video.
• 12 million U.S. mobile subscribers access their social networks over their phone. At the end of 2008, Facebook was just slightly ahead of MySpace in terms of unique mobile users: 7 million compared to 5.7 million. Mobile usage of social networking sites grew 260% during 2008 in the U.S.

It's Facebook's world, we just live in it

Posted in Youth Culture Research on January 15th, 2009

Filed Under: Analysis, Demographics, Facebook, Gen Y, Generation Y, iStrategyLabs, Millenials, MySpace, social networkign, Youth Culture Research, Youth demographics, Youth Marketing, youth trends

As you’ve surely heard, social networking’s reigning goliath, Facebook, grew larger and more goliath-like in 2008.  It officially surpassed Myspace as the world’s most popular social networking tool in April 2008.  Interestingly, much of it’s virus-like growth has taken place abroad.  According to Google, Facebook was the single most popular search term in Belgium, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Switzerland — and it was among the top ten most popular searches within every other country Google tracks.  Which is, you know, basically the whole world.

As the number of active Facebook users quickly approaches the size of a country of its own, the blogosphere has been overflowing with good demographic data that might be of interest to you all.  Our ever-sage friends at iStrategyLabs have an excellent summary here.  Forrester Research’s Jeremiah Owyang has a wider social networking survey here.  Carolyn Phillips at Millenial Marketing has an analysis worth reading as well.

The quick-and-dirty analysis is simple: Facebook is growing in every conceivable direction.  At nearly 60 million active users world wide, we’re all running out of big-sounding adjectives to describe it.  With that said, the most rapid expansion is taking place not among Millenials — who are by and large already there — but the parents of Millenials.  As more than a few people have noted, Facebook is getting older and grayer by the day.

Although there is much hand-wringing across the blogosphere about the likely reaction from the audience we all watch so carefully — those somewhere along the high school and college continuum — we at YMC are unequivocally confident that, at least for the next few years, Facebook will remain a force in the youth marketing world.  (For those who needed a reminder, Burger King reminded us of Facebook’s power just the other day.)  For the near future, no doubt, Facebook will continue to be an important arrow in YMC’s quiver — and for all others interested in holistic youth marketing.  Of course it’s just as important to remember, however, that social networking is just one of many tools.  A good campaign is a holistic one — a campaign that touches young people across a number of platforms, creating true peer-driven brand experiences as it goes.  It’s our good fortunes as marketers to live in a world where this can be accomplished in so many different ways.