OPA Study Runs Out Of Names For Online Activity

Something called the Online Publisher Organization Internet Activity Index is out, and it has some very interesting information in it; just not what they think it is. It measures the proportion of online time spent doing purely communications functions, as compared to viewing online content. According to the study, in the last four years it's shifted massively from the "talking to one another" side to the "looking at stuff" side. Anybody that's seen YouTube could have told you that. 

The time consumers spent viewing online content, including video-sharing sites, news sites, video, social nets, weather and blogs, as a proportion of their total time online grew over the past four years from 34 percent in 2003 to 47 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, time spent on communications fell 28 percent as a proportion of total time spent online. Communications now makes up 33 percent of all time spent online, down from 46 percent in 2003.

The OPA attributes the shift to several factors, including an increase in the volume of content online, the transition of traditionally offline media activities to the Web, and continued broadband adoption. This latter factor has enabled a lift in overall time spent online –- as opposed to share of time spent -- across all four categories studied: content, search, commerce, and communications.

There are problems. They count social networking sites as content. Anybody who knows a teenager knows that that's how they communicate, along with straight text messaging. They think e-mail is for stock pump and dump schemes and old folks. The internet keeps on spawning applications that no one knows how to describe or rank, including organizations that do nothing but describe or rank such things.

And they left out pornography, so they don't know what half of the human race is up to, either.
Tags:  Study, Online, AC, AM, ACT