The proportion of time Americans are spending on such engaging Web pursuits as social networking, and watching online video is approaching moon-shot status, according to new findings from research firm Nielsen Online. And for that matter, so are the audience sizes.
The study found that the number of American users headed for online video destinations such as YouTube and Hulu.com has grown 339% from 2003 to 2009, while time spent on video sites has expanded almost 2,000% in the same period.
In the last year alone, video-centric Web sites increased their unique visitors by 10%, while streams per user grew 27% and total minutes spent watching online video jumped 71%, Nielsen determined.
Meanwhile, time spent engaged with social networks went up 73% in the last year, and the unique audience for those networks grew 11%. From 2003 to 2009, social networks saw an 87% increase in unique visitors. In the U.S., Nielsen found, social network usage grew 2.6% between December 2007 and December 2008 and now stands at about 67%.
In fact, global social network usage outstripped e-mail in reach for the first time in February of 2009, with 68.4% of the world’s Internet users engaged that month in social networking vs. 64.8% who used e-mail. Social networks saw a 1.65 growth in reach during the first two months of this year, compared to a 0.3% decline for e-mail.
“In recent years the Internet has changed dramatically as people seek more personalized relationships online,’ Nielsen online senior vice president for research and analytics Charles Buchwalter said in a release. “In particular, time spent on social networks and video sites has increased astronomically. Advertisers are starting to positively reassess the value of the online experience and create more meaningful relationships with consumers.”
This is not always an unmixed blessing for brands. Nielsen mapped out the brand associations linked to Motrin both before and after a flap arose on the Twitter microblog platform in November 2008 about online ads that playfully described babies as fashion accessories. Nielsen found that after that Twitter ruckus, the brand Motrin had a much higher association with terms such as ‘backlash,” “offensive,” “condescending” and “offensive Motrin ad.”
In other results, Nielsen Online found that social networking has also grown into one of the most important categories in mobile Web use. Mobile usage of social networks grew 260% during 2008; more than 12 million American mobile subscribers now access their social networks over their phones, with Facebook beating MySpace in unique mobile users 7 million to 5.7 million.
The trend is important, the report said, because ‘social networking has the potential to be a bridge category that draws even more subscribers into the mobile Web experience.”
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