by drm on February 22, 2010
I found a few data points about U.S. internet usage in January from Nielsen, the media research firm, very interesting.
The first data set looked at the top 10 web brands in January.
Google was the most trafficked site in the month, with more than 153 million unique visitors, but Facebook was the most used site in the month, with the average user spending 7 hours on Facebook, more than three times as long as any other site.
All told, users spent nearly 816 hours on Facebook in January, compared to just 193.2 million hours on Google. That’s four times as long.
Interestingly, time on Facebook grew at a faster rate than total visits.
Nielsen also released some composite statistics on U.S. internet usage.
The average user looked at more than 2600 web pages each month, but spent less than a minute on each page. That butterfly effect makes the 7 hours spent on Facebook even more pronounced.
The statistic made me wonder just how much the average web surfer is worth in revenue every month. I can’t think of any way to reliably build up a figure. To calculate it, you’d have to be able to estimate the average revenue per page for the web. If you figure that the average revenue per thousand users for a media enterprise is $25 — a guess that assumes three ad units with an average CPM of $7 — then our average surfer is worth $65 in ad revenue every month.
Assuming that internet access is costing about $75, then the average web users accounts for $130 per month in advertising and access charges.
Not a lot of revenue to go around.
by drm on February 5, 2010
An underlying premise of social networking is the authenticity and credibility of your social graph. When people who you have networked with digitally recommend information, experience or products, you are likely to lend their recommendations more credibility than someone you don’t know. Facebook and Twitter make this kind of socially-curated content sharing incredibly convenient to do.
MINOnline shares recent data from Hitwise that shows just how much impact content sharing has. The chart to the left shows the share of click-thrus to news and media sites from Google News and Facebook. Since May, Facebook has increased its share of upstream click-thrus significantly against Google News.
Some of the phenomenon is driven by scale: Google News has about 63 million visits a month, compared to 2.7 billion for Facebook. But more of the phenomenon is driven by the way people use Facebook; according to the company, more than 3.5 million pieces of content — web links, news stories, blog posts, etc. — are shared by Facebook users each week. People are filtering content, and are looking for content filtered by the members of their social graph.
This trend underscores the opportunities for marketers and media brands.
For a marketer, when a consumer has elected to include your brand in their social graph, they will be receptive to shared content. An effective content-marketing program, which attempts to educate, enlighten and entertain consumers about your brand is an effective way to increase awareness and drive web traffic.
For a media brand, the concept of curating content becomes an important component of your strategy for connecting with an audience. People have a large appetite for content; the increase in the proportion of content that they are accessing through trusted connections suggest that people are looking into their social graph to ensure a good content experience. When a consumer includes a media brand in their social graph, they are inviting that brand to help guide their exploration of good content. It doesn’t all have to be original. It does all have to be useful and relevant to the brand experience.
This shift toward accessing content through curated networks will only increase in the future. Media and marketing brands have an opportunity to increase their brand footprint if they become active and useful participants in the phenomenon.
