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 [Read more…]
