The Web has quickly become America's playground. A new study from Nielsen finds that more U.S. Web users are using broadband, going social, and checking out Web videos.
According to Nielsen, of the 195 million active Web users in the U.S, 160.3 million, or 93.3 percent, access the Web with a broadband connection, representing a 16 percent increase over 2008 figures.
Nielsen also found that more Americans than ever are consuming online video content. The research firm said 138.4 million unique viewers watched online video in 2009, up 11.4 percent from 2008. All told, they average 11.2 billion video streams per month. The typical U.S.-based Web viewer watches 200.1 minutes of video per month.
U.S. Web users are also going social in a big way. According to Nielsen, 56 percent of active U.S. Web users spend an average of six hours on Facebook per month. The social network is also the third-most-visited site by users who are 65 and older. Nielsen said Twitter's growth has topped 500 percent year-over-year. All told, the amount of time Americans spent on social networking sites in 2009 increased by 277 percent.
U.S. Web users are accessing those social networks just about anywhere. Nielsen found the average U.S. worker spends five hours per month browsing social networks from the office. It also found that 32 percent of all mobile Web users visited a social network in 2009.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Facebook isn't just for kids anymore, but it looks like Disney's still an admirer: The entertainment conglomerate has nominated Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of the massive social network, to its board of directors.
In a release Wednesday, Disney made the announcement and stated that shareholders will vote on Sandberg's nomination (along with the re-election of its 12 current directors) at the company's annual meeting on March 12 in San Antonio, Texas.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)"Sheryl has been at the forefront of a technological revolution that's opened up a world of new possibilities for consumers and which has greatly affected the way we do business," Disney CEO and president Robert Iger said in the release. "Her unique insight, born of great practical experience, will be of considerable value to Disney's shareholders."
Sandberg was named to the COO position at Facebook last March, following the departure of executive Owen Van Natta, who is now CEO of the News Corp.-owned MySpace. Sandberg has since become one of Facebook's chief liaisons with the media and advertising industries, speaking at numerous conferences to pitch the social network's ad and marketing products.
Prior to her hire at Facebook, Sandberg was a sales executive at Google and chief of staff for the U.S. Treasury Department.
So where does Disney stand in the Web 2.0 world? It owns kiddie virtual world Club Penguin, which it acquired for $350 million well before the real hype began over social games and virtual goods. It's also reportedly in talks with Apple to become part of the tech giant's potential subscription TV service, and this spring became a partner in joint video venture Hulu alongside original partners NBC and News Corp.
Research firm Nielsen has released its top advertising trends for 2010. Not surprisingly the leading trend is the ability to measure activity that merges online and offline purchasing behavior, addressing the fact that users have expanded options for how they consume content and how they interact with brands.
Nielsen data shows that "time spent on each of the three screens--TV, PC and mobile--is increasing. In particular, the consumption of video content is on the rise across all platforms."
Top advertising trends for 2010
- Optimizing media convergence is a top priority
- New models emerge to take advantage of smartphones
- More cross-media ad campaigns surface
- Commercialization of social networking hubs increase
- More interesting and interactive online ads appear
The challenge with advertising mediums such as video (TV more so than online) is that they require users to not only be interested in the product but remember it when they are making a purchasing decision. This, of course, is why online advertising has proven to be such a lucrative model. Consumers, in theory, can be served an ad and then perform some kind of action, such as buying a product online.
Nielsen asserts that for consumer packaged goods, "purchasing decisions in 2010 will be affected by factors such as brand innovation, retailer assortment, proliferation of store brands, and healthy eating preferences." With the exception of healthy eating (maybe eco-friendly tech is the comparison?), the technology industry won't be dramatically different.
Large brands like Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft must continue to innovate (brand innovation), more start-ups will join the fray (retailer assortment), companies like Dell will offer more services to support their hardware business (proliferation of store brands) and maybe electric cars become the healthy eating of the tech world.
What remains to be seen is which advertising trends are the most efficient and cost-effective. Social networking has been largely aggregated onto a few major sites such as Facebook and MySpace, while other niche sites garner far less traffic (though potentially more per-user dollars.)
The biggest opportunity is to make people actually like seeing advertising. Despite all of the hype and success around ads, I've yet to meet someone who claims to just love Internet ads. We all accept ads as a part of our lives online, so there is certainly an opportunity for more interesting online ad formats.
Susan Boyle's first appearance on "Britain's Got Talent" tallied the most worldwide views on YouTube for 2009, the video site said Wednesday.
The video of the once-unknown singer captured more than 120 million views.
Her video was followed "David After Dentist" (37 million views), "JK Wedding Entrance Dance" (33 million views), "New Moon Movie Trailer" (31 million views), and "Evian Roller Babies" (27 million views).
YouTube also looked specifically at which music videos tallied the most views for the year.
Pitbull's "I Know You Want Me" had more than 82 million views this year. That was followed by two Miley Cyrus songs--"The Climb" and "Party in the U.S.A"--with 64 million and 54 million views, respectively. The Lonley Island's "I'm On a Boat" and Keri Hilson's "Knock You Down" rounded out the top five.
You may notice that Michael Jackson videos, surprisingly, didn't capture more views than the top clips of the year. According to YouTube, the pop star's "Thriller" video was one of the fastest rising searches but it failed to acquire enough views to push it into the top five most-viewed videos.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Iran's elections topped Twitter's list of most popular topics of 2009, according to the microblogging site.
"Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, one topic surfaced repeatedly," the company wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "Twitter users found the Iranian elections the most engaging topic of the year. The terms #iranelection, Iran and Tehran were all in the top-21 of Trending Topics, and #iranelection finished in a close second behind the regular weekly favorite #musicmonday."
The fact that Iran's elections rose to the top on Twitter is noteworthy because Twitter itself became a tool for organizing post-election demonstrations in Iran.
In the category of top news topics on Twitter, items related to the Iranian elections and swine flu took five of the top six spots for the year. They were followed by Gaza, AIG, and President Obama's inauguration.
A look at the top trending topics of 2009 on Twitter.
(Credit: Twitter)Among the most-discussed people of the year, Michael Jackson took the top spot. He was followed by singing sensations Susan Boyle and Adam Lambert, respectively. Kobe Bryant, Chris Brown, Chuck Norris, Joe Wilson, Tiger Woods, Christian Bale, and Alex Rodriguez rounded out the top 10 most-discussed people of the year on Twitter.
"Harry Potter" was the most engaging film of the year for Twitter users, followed by "New Moon," "District 9," "Paranormal Activity," and "Star Trek."
"American Idol" was the top television show on Twitter, followed by "Glee," the "Teen Choice Awards," "Saturday Night Live," and "Dollhouse."
On the tech side, it was Google Wave that engaged the most Twitter users, followed by Snow Leopard, Tweetdeck, Windows 7, and CES.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Although numerous activities are available to get Americans off the couch, they still prefer to be there, a report from the NPD Group has found.
When asked how they'd spent their leisure-time hours in the past week, a whopping 81 percent of the 10,281 respondents had watched television, for about 10 hours on average for the week. It was the top leisure-time activity in the study, which covered people ages 13 and above. And that figure didn't even include watching movies on TV. It only included shows, news, and sports.
"There's a perception that families spending time in front of a glowing TV hearth has been replaced by glowing laptop or iPod displays," Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD, said Tuesday in a statement. "And while that's true for some families, TV remains the top entertainment choice by far in the United States."
The NPD Group also found that traditional radio shouldn't be dismissed quite yet. Radio listening came in second place behind watching TV. A total of 78 percent of Americans listened to traditional radio, for more than five hours a week on average.
E-mail and instant messaging are also quite popular, with 70 percent taking part in those activities, for about four hours per week. The research firm also found that 60 percent of people still listen to music on CD.
About 47 percent of respondents said they visit social networks, for an average of five hours per week. And 11 percent of those surveyed said they tweet, for about three hours per week.
But it was the television that took the top spot for leisure activities. It seems that, when given the chance, most Americans choose the couch over anything else. Does that include you?
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Although those aged 65 and older make up less than 10 percent of active Web users, a new Nielsen study has found that over the past five years, the number of seniors using the Internet regularly has increased by a 55 percent.
According to Nielsen, there were just 11.3 million seniors actively using the Web in November 2004. Five years, later, there are now more than 17.5 million seniors surfing around. Senior women have picked up the Web faster than men, outpacing men by 6 percent.
Check out where the seniors are going on the Web.
(Credit: Nielsen Company)Seniors aren't just going to the Web, they're staying there. Nielsen found that the amount time seniors surf increased 11 percent in the last five years from 52 hours per month to a little more than 58 hours per month in November.
Nielsen research director Chuck Schilling said in a statement that seniors are sharing photos, social networking, and reading the news.
According to the data Nielsen culled from its study, 88.6 percent of seniors use the Web to check their personal e-mail. The study also found that 68.6 percent of respondents were viewing and printing maps online, while 60.1 percent said that they check the weather.
Nielsen said the top online destination for seniors in November was Google Search, tallying 10.3 million unique visitors. Windows Media Player was used by 8.2 million unique senior visitors, and Facebook captured the third spot with 7.9 million visitors.
Facebook is where the most growth among seniors was seen. A year ago, Facebook was ranked 45th for the most popular senior destination--a far cry from its current third spot. That kind of growth falls in line with the dramatic increase in senior use of social networks and blogs. Nielsen said those 65 and older have increased social and blog visiting by 53 percent. They now represent 8.2 percent of all social network and blog visitors on the Web.
Click here to read the full Nielsen study.
Got a case of information overload? You're not alone.
A study released Wednesday from the University of California, San Diego, reports that the average American consumes a whopping 34GB of data and 100,000 words of information per day.
Over the course of 2008, Americans as a group gobbled up 3.6 zettabytes of data. (In case you missed the definition of "zettabyte" in your daily data binging, that's a million million gigabytes.) For all you visual learners out there, the researchers helpfully point out that 3.6 zettabytes is equal to the "information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska."
Between 1980 and 2008, the number of bytes consumed by Americans increased 350 percent. The average annual growth rate was calculated at 5.4 percent.
Here's how TV and the Internet stack up in the "How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers."
(Credit: University of California, San Diego)Dubbed the How Much Information? project, the study measured data consumption both at home and away from home. It includes several information sources, "including going to the movies, listening to the radio, talking on the cell phone, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and reading the newspaper."
Besides bytes and words, the study also noted the number of hours spent consuming information.
In terms of time, traditional media still has a strong hold on the U.S. The study reported that "a large chunk of the average American's day is spent watching television." On average, 41 percent of an American's day is given over to watching television shows, viewing recorded TV, or watching DVDs.
Noncomputer sources, the study says, account for more than three-quarters of U.S. households' information time.
But if bytes are the standard by which American days are judged, it's the video game that takes the top prize. Researchers found that the average American consumes 18.5GB of gaming data per day, representing 67 percent of all bytes they consume daily.
"Games are almost universal, but most of the gaming bytes come from graphically intensive games on high-powered computers and consoles, which have the equivalent of special-purpose supercomputers from five years ago," report author Roger Bohn, director of the Global Information Industry Center at UC San Diego's School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, said in a statement. "Games today generate their bytes inside the home, rather than having to transmit them over cables into the house, but gaming is increasingly moving online."
The study found that 16 percent of daily information consumption comes from the Internet. A staggering 79 percent of all American two-way communications is done through the Internet.
If you want to see what else UC San Diego found in its study, click here.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Hot on the heels of Friendster's recent face-lift, the onetime social-networking pioneer has found a buyer.
MOL Global, a Malaysian online payment company, has agreed to purchase Friendster, the companies announced late Wednesday. Terms of the deal were not revealed, but rumors last week said a likely asking price would start around $100 million.
"This combination is a natural progression of our relationship and will be an industry-changing event," Richard Kimber, chief executive officer at Friendster, said in a statement. "The new combined entity gives Friendster the kind of financial backing, retail distribution, and e-commerce infrastructure that will enable us to accelerate our strategy and create a locally relevant, fun experience for our users in Asia, both on and offline."
Kimber confirmed last week that the company was shopping itself to buyers as the social-networking site was unveiling a redesigned site that focused on the Asian youth market. The revamped Friendster site offers a suite of features designed to capitalize on the social-gaming craze: a virtual currency, an array of games, and virtual gifts.
Of Friendster's 115 million registered users worldwide, 75 million are based in Asia, and 90 percent of its traffic comes from the Asia-Pacific region. It started offering translated versions of the site two years ago.
The two companies announced a partnership in October in which MOL would provide a payments platform for Friendster Wallet and Friendster Gift Shop.
Ganesh Kumar Bangah, president and chief executive officer of MOL, will become the group chief executive officer of the combined entity. Kimber, who formerly served as Google's regional managing director in Southeast Asia, will become the non-executive chairman.
The lack of access to Facebook has created a lot of anguish among young Vietnamese.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)
HANOI, Vietnam--Vietnam's access to Facebook has been intermittent at best for about a month. However, after two weeks here in Hanoi, I haven't been able to get an official answer as to whether the popular social-networking Web site is being blocked here.
Internet service providers in Vietnam blame the spotty access on "technical issues," without offering an estimate for when the problems will be resolved. A representative from Viettel, a DSL and cell phone service provider, told me "there might be something wrong with Facebook."
None of the government personnel I was able to talk to during a recent trip back to my homeland would give me an answer, either. Some seemed to be unaware of the outage. However, during a media briefing on December 3, Nguyen Phuong Nga, a representative of Vietnam's Foreign Ministry, affirmed that agencies have been evaluating the contents of certain social Web sites because "many people in Vietnam have been upset that a number of social Web sites have been misused," basically posting information of an undisclosed nature that is deemed inappropriate.
I'm unaware of any misuse, but the upset seems much louder from the other side. With more than a million users and counting, the limited access to Facebook has created a lot of anguish. Lan Nguyen, a 23-year-old English student in Hanoi said, "I use Facebook daily. Now, it feels like something just got stolen from me." She uses FPT Telecom, one of the biggest DSL providers in Vietnam.
Ha Do of Ho Chi Minh city, another mid-20s, self-proclaimed Facebook addict who has some 1,800 friends, put it simply: "This sucks big time!" She revealed, however, that she still could access the site from some cafes, though definitely not from home. Upset and disappointment are common feelings among those I talked to about the matter.
This also affects a lot of small businesses in Vietnam, especially bars, restaurants, and tourism agencies that use Facebook to promote themselves to the outside world.
A curious silence
The week before I arrived in Vietnam, I was wondering why most of my Facebook friends in the country completely ignored my poking and never updated their pages. I'm afraid things won't get any better.
