Firetop

This morning I visited the Grange Fitzrovia Hotel in London to attend a Forrester Research presentation. There the folks at Forrester went through the results of their second 2006 UK Internet user study. Forrester run such surveys every 6 months, collecting user data from over 130,000 UK consumer profiles visiting the UK’s most popular websites. Typically this data is collected through invitation to an online survey, as a visitor surfs a website. Participants are questioned over their basic demographic information such as age, sex and income - data which is then reviewed against their own described online behaviour to identify trends. For me the results were fascinating, giving a great insight into the real UK usage levels of blogs, social media, mobile phones and media sites.

The Forrester presentation will apparently be made available online within the coming days, until that time I will simply state some of the findings that stood out for me:

Mobile technology is still considered poor for Internet usage
Very few people are embracing mobile phone technology to do anything more that send SMS messages, make phone calls and take photographs (the latter up massively to over 70% this year). Surfing the web, sending emails and instant messaging are all still in their infancy – mainly among the very young, with the majority of mobile users identifying problems with WAP navigation, speed of download and layout of content. The majority of people who do access news using mobile technology do so to read The Sun and not The Guardian – presumably due to the fact that articles in The Sun are shorter and more widely read by students, whereas the Guardian is read by a wealthier demographic who cannot bear to read long articles using a handheld device.

Social media sites are a poor audience for advertisers of high value goods
a) The main audience responsible for visiting social media websites, reading blogs, downloading podcasts / vidcasts and using RSS are in the 16-24 age group. As a result, the levels of popularity for these new technologies are still very low.
b) The 16-24 age group spend five time less online per quarter than their older UK Internet peers, but make many more smaller transactions - buying ringtones, music downloads and books.
c) The 35-55 age group are spending much greater sums of money online - white goods, electricals, holidays, travel, insurance etc. However, they are not embracing the new Web 2.0 technologies anything like as much… and even still read print newspapers (god forbid!).

a + b + c means that the only advertisers who should be interested in targeting the likes of MySpace and YouTube are the purveyors of low end consumables such as music, ringtones and books. The majority of the audience doesn’t have a large budget to spend on anything else (or a desire for home / family goods). Quite how anybody will monetise MySpace or YouTube without the key wealth demographic isn’t clear to me. In ten years from now the 16-24 age group will clearly have aged and gained in wealth - whether this will mean they are still engaged in time consuming activities like social media and blogging is another matter. Furthermore, can MySpace or YouTube wait ten years to get the bigger advertisers that they need?

A few email marketing indicators
People prefer receiving email advertising to seeing online in-page advertising as they surf – not sure why. 24% of people say they open promotional email (which ties in with most of my actual findings from e-campaigns). Email recipients want to be able to specify how many emails they are willing to receive from a specific publisher – promotional or content based. ‘Occasional’ just isn’t a clear enough indication for recipients who are becoming increasingly annoyed by email marketing volumes.

Technorati Tags: forrester, mobile technology, blogging, wap, streaming video, myspace, youtube

Bookmark to: