17% of Everyone's Time - 18-50++ Got Model?

Not Just a Survey

When Ball State University Center for Media Design did a new study on how we use media, they didn’t want to take a survey. Surveys have that problem of people self-reporting their behavior — sometimes folks aren’t, well, accurate. Hoping to avoid that issue the Center for Media Design took a slightly different approach. They followed subjects for an entire day to observe behaviors as they happened.

In his BusinessWeek|online article “How We Use the Web Today,” Carlos Bergfeld reports on the study.

The study, they say, gives one of the clearest glimpses of the Internet’s media influence, especially during the working day. More than 60% of participants use the Web during the day, vs. 40% for newspapers, and about 30% for magazines, according to the study, commissioned by the Online Publishers Assn., of which BusinessWeek.com is a member. And at work, the Web dominates media consumption, the researchers say.

People are spending a lot more time during the day on the Web, too — on average about 120 minutes. That’s less than they listen to the radio, but much longer than the roughly half hour they read newspapers or magazines. (TV is still the media king, gobbling more than 240 minutes of a viewer’s day.) A decade ago, people were spending less than an hour on the Web, the study says.

Two important facts that came out of the study were that

17% of consumer media time is spent on the Internet — but only 8% of the advertising dollars are spent there {per Veronis Suhler Stevenson].
Men and women of all age groups spend roughly the same amount of time browing the web — that it is a young male medium is no longer a fact.

“The notion that it’s a young person’s medium or that it’s a male medium — those [ideas] really don’t hold up anymore,” says Michael Holmes, associate director of insight and research at Ball State’s Center for Media Design. Of course, those groups are using the Net in varying ways, he adds. [via Carlos Bergfeld]

The article goes on to report the downside of this kind of study, which is that people behave differently when they are being observed, pointing to the fact that no subject was observed reading pornography.

Got Model?

That gap of 17% of consumer time spent on the Internet being supported by only 8% of the advertising dollar could be worrisome. Granted percentages really mean nothing when the numbers aren’t here to support them, but . . . there’s a trend coming over the transom and the response seems to be stuck in a mode that has everyone talking, because no one knows what else to do.

What worries me is that we’re all getting used to a web in which there is no advertising and cover charge either.

Scott Karp, not long ago was wondering What if no one will pay for content? I can’t get his question out of my mind. What if writing content — newspapers, books, magazines, becomes a “gentleperson’s pastime,” a leisure activity? What if we learn not to expect to pay or get paid for what we write?

It seems like we need a Web 2.0 marketing and advertising model before the opportunity to advertise on the Internet closes up completely. In the weirdest way, it seems like we need to attract advertisers to invest in the Internet so that we can get paid to write.

Help me out . . . is this just Liz think?

–ME “Liz” Strauss