The latest Veronis Suhler report on the state of media says that online advertising will be bigger than newspaper advertisting in the U.S. — $62 billion — by 2011; this already happened in the UK. An inexorable path.
The report also says that our total media usage is declining, though what’s interesting to me is that part of this, they say, comes from efficiency and that’s an important concept in the morphing of media: The internet exposes the inefficiencies of old media for both “consumers” and advertisers. The internet makes direct connections. Note also in the report that we are taking in less ad-supported media because there is more media without ads and also, again, because we can connect directly to information around advertising.
For the first time since 1997, consumers spent less time with media in 2006 than they did the previous year, as media usage per person declined 0.5% to 3,530 hours, due to changing consumer behaviors and digital media efficiencies, according to the VSS Forecast. The drop in consumer media usage was driven by the continued migration of consumers to digital alternatives for news, information and entertainment, which require less time investment than their traditional media counterparts. For example, consumers typically watch broadcast or cable television at least 30 minutes per session while they spend as little as five to seven minutes viewing consumer-generated video clips online. . . .
In addition to shifting their attention to alternative media, consumers are also migrating away from advertising-supported media, such as broadcast TV and newspapers, to consumer-supported platforms, such as cable TV and videogames. Time spent with consumer-supported media grew at a CAGR of 19.8 percent from 2001 to 2006, while time spent with ad-supported media declined 6.3 percent in the period.
