Wednesday, July 27, 2011

71% of Online Adults Regularly View Online Videos

The Pew Research Center has released a new video-sharing study that found 71 percent of online adults say they regularly watch videos on a video-sharing sites such as YouTube or Vimeo.

That represents a five-percentage-point increase from the 66% of online adults who reported being video-sharing site users a year earlier and a 38-point increase from five years ago when the Pew Internet Project took its first reading on use of such sites.

The Pew study further found that non-white adult internet users have higher rates of video-sharing site use than their white counterparts, a consistent finding since 2006.

Overall, 69% of white internet users said they had visited video-sharing sites, 13 points higher than in April 2009, and more than double the 31% reported when the question was first asked in December 2006.

At the same time, 79% of online non-whites -- African-Americans, Hispanics and others -- reported using video-sharing sites. That figure is 12 points higher than April 2009, and 41 points higher than in 2006.

Then there is Pew's study from this past winter that reports an ongoing trend of more and more people getting their news from a variety of Internet sources rather than newspapers or TV.

In 2010, for the first time, the internet surpassed television as the main source of national and international news for people younger than 30. (chart right)

Since 2007, the number of 18 to 29 year old adults citing the internet as their main source has nearly doubled, from 34% to 65%.

Over this period, the number of young people citing television as their main news source has dropped from 68% to 52%.

The internet is slowly closing in on television as Americans’ main source of national and international news.

Television remains the most widely used source for national and international news – 66% of Americans say it is their main source of news – but that is down from 74% three years ago and 82% as recently as 2002.

More than 50% of adults in the younger age groups, the prime Democratic demographic, now get their news from Internet information sources rather than from broadcast and cable TV programming.

Next is the Pew Research Center survey report released earlier this month that found one third of American adults – 35% – have adopted smartphones in the last four years and that some 87% of smartphone owners regularly access the internet and email on their smartphone, including two-thirds (68%) who do so on a typical day. Several demographic groups have even high levels of smartphone adoption, including the financially well-off and well-educated, African-American, Hispanic-Americans and those under the age of 45.

Smartphone ownership continues to accelerate, driven by price drops, feature phone user upgrades, and the faster, more appealing 4G network. Mobile Internet is the most often considered "must have" feature when people go shopping for a new phone purchase. Gartner Inc. research predicts that by as soon as 2013, mobile smartphone devices will overtake personal computers, including laptops, as the most common way people access the Internet to read news, communicate with friends on social websites and so forth.

So people are increasingly accessing the Internet anywhere anytime on their smartphones.
Clearly it would be wise for everyone planning to run for public office in 2012 as well as political organizations wanting to influence which candidates win election to include YouTube videos as part part of their campaign strategy.

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