A recent report provided by the Online Publishers Association shows that users prefer online content like news or videos rather than buying things or communicating with others.
According to the aforementioned report, content captures more nearly half of the time users spend online, a 37% increase in share of time from four years ago.
The OPA studied Internet users’ habits concerning e-commerce, search, communication and content for four years, and released the conclusions of the study on August 13, in what is called the Internet Activity Index (IAI).
According to the OPA's IAI, conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings, communications accounted for 46% of consumers' time online in 2003. By contrast, consumers spend 47% of their time with online content in 2007, a dramatic increase from the 34% four years ago. Search and content have both registered a solid overall growth in this period, 35% for search and 37% for online content. Although the increase is impressive, search still occupies very little of the time users spend online, accounting for only 5% in 2007 (January to May).
"When the OPA created the IAI, our goal was to provide a reliable, ongoing measure of the time being spent with key online activities," said OPA president Pam Horan. "For the last four years, the IAI has identified important trends in Web use and added to our understanding of consumer engagement online. As seen by Nielsen//NetRatings' recent introduction of the 'Total Minutes' metric, time spent helps to define engagement and serves as a valuable supplement to other key measures."
"The IAI has identified a very significant and sustained trend in where consumers are spending their online time," Horan said. "The index indicates that, over the last four years, the primary role of the Internet has shifted from communications to content."
One of the revolutionary “inventions” that drove content closer to people was YouTube (along with other similar sites), but online social networks like MySpace, Digg or Facebook are not to be neglected. Actually, video and audio streaming has now surpassed the P2P technology in the US, for broadband connections (in terms of Web traffic, that means the HTTP traffic is now bigger than the peer-to-peer traffic), and is set to increase even more. This is also reflected by OPA’s study, which found that content's share of time grew only 10% in 2003, remained 10% between 2003 and 2004, and registered a 13% spike for two consecutive years (2005-2006 and 2006-2007).
Horan added: "The dominant role of content is driven by several important factors. The first is the online transition of traditionally offline activities, such as getting news, finding entertainment information or checking the weather. Quality content sites see a consistent pattern -- major news drives traffic spikes, but traffic remains consistently higher even after the event. Major news events such as Hurricane Katrina and high profile seasonal events such as the NCAA Final Four Basketball tournament are clearly driving consumers to engage more deeply with online content."
"New online features and communities are also leading consumers to spend a larger share of their online time with content. Consumers spend considerable time with social networking sites, which serve not only as places of content but are also increasingly important communications vehicles."
Among the factors that influence the shift towards content are: faster and more accessible Internet connections, the popularity of video sites, refined search engines (consumers find more easily and quickly the exact content they are looking for, increasing the likelihood they will engage more deeply with that content) and the rise of instant messaging, which is a much more efficient tool than e-mail.
According to research firm comScore Media Matrix, nearly 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video per user during the month of May 2007.
Americans watched more than 8.3 billion video streams online for the same period, with Google Sites ranking as the top U.S. streaming video property, with 1.8 billion videos streamed (21.5 percent share of streams), 1.7 billion of which occurred at YouTube.com. In total, nearly 132 million Americans viewed online streaming video in May.
According to Pew Internet and American Life Project, three-quarters of US broadband users (74%) who enjoy high-speed connections at both home and work watch or download video online. Moreover, fifty-seven percent of online adults have used the internet to watch or download video, and 19% do so on a typical day.
