Web 2.0 beats traditional advertising methods...and Google Trends proves it!

I spent some time on Google Trends today as I was thinking about web 2.0 tools for marketing compared to traditional marketing methods. You may recall I consider traditional promotion strategies the big fish of marketing (and I advocate going after the far more numerous small and medium size fish.) In my first test I compared direct mail, tv ads, billboards, and radio advertising.

One note about Google Trends before we proceed...this is just showing the relative quantity of Google searches on the given search terms. It may be easy to dismiss this but as Steve Rubel said in this post, "search engines show us what's on everyone's mind," and it's therefore interesting to note the trends of the collective thinking.

Here's what the trends show over the last four years in these traditional marketing areas:

What you see here is that all but billboards are down from four years ago. Direct mail seemed to fall slowly and then hold fairly even in 2007. TV ads appear to have the most dramatic swings. Incidentally, notice the spike in TV ads early each year. Those are Super Bowl commercial searches for sure. Radio was down a little but steady for the last four years, though clearly below the other three areas.

After I looked at these four areas I included the term "web 2.0" to see if that mere term competed with these traditional mediums. Here's what I found:

Web 2.0 really didn't take off until late 2005. By early 2006 you see that it eclipses the four traditional terms and then clears them significantly through 2006 and 2007.

Just for fun I tried one more trend comparison by throwing "blogs" into the mix. I dropped radio ads from the comparison since it was at the bottom of the pile and here's what I found:

With "blogs" included it makes everything else just look silly. I was actually surprised it was such a huge difference. More surprising to me was that it was higher even back in 2004. We know that there were less than six million blogs at most in 2004 so it's a bit curious to me, but quite interesting.

So what can we derive from all of this? At the very least we know there are far more searches for "web 2.0" and "blogs" than than any of the traditional marketing methods. Even if all those searches weren't marketing related (and we know that's the case), the phrase web 2.0 is a business, marketing, and technology term. We can discern that the collective marketing and business interests are greatly interested in web 2.0 from these trends and if that's where they are, it's reasonable to look more seriously at them if you still have doubts.

One final one for kicks if you're interested. Who do you think wins in a match up of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Google, and blogs? See it here.

Online Video Views Surpassing Expectations

I've been doing some research the last few days around online video usage by Americans. Earlier this year I came across these online video stats:

January 2007 Report: U.S. Online Video Viewers
(sources: eMarketer; U.S. Census Bureau)

• 2003 – 52 million (32% of U.S. Internet users; 19% of population)
• 2004 – 69 million (41% of U.S. Internet users; 25% of population)
• 2005 – 89 million (51% of U.S. Internet users; 32% of population)
• 2006 – 107 million (60% of U.S. Internet users; 38% of population)
• 2007 projection – 123 million (67% of U.S. Internet users; 43% of population)
• 2008 projection – 137 million (73% of U.S. Internet users; 47% of population)

Today I found these stats which show that by July of this year the actual American online video usage was far surpassing the late 2006 projections. In fact, the ComScore stats below show the actual online video views surpassing even the 2008 projections above....

July 2007 Report: U.S. Online Video Views
(source: ComScore)
Nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users watched an average of three hours of online video during the month. More than 9 billion videos were viewed by online during July, 2007. 2.4 billion of the video views occurred at YouTube.com. Yahoo! sites ranked second with 390 million, followed by Fox Interactive Media with 298 million, and Viacom Digital with 281 million.

What's the takeaway here? If you thought online video was a fad or even a slow trend it's actually quite the opposite. Besides, you know when she's jumping on board it's full-fledged mainstream.

Doing online video? Keep it under three minutes.

A recent report by the New York Times says the average online video duration is 2.7 minutes. The report also said that 75% of Internet users watch an average of three hours of online video a month and that YouTube had 2.4 billion video views in the month of July. Yes, billion. That's a lot of video viewing. So what are the takeaways from this?

1. It's a great time to do online video for your organization. People are already there looking for the good stuff. It's not new anymore so you should have an easier time convincing someone that it's a good idea.
   
2. Keep the videos brief because an unspoken expectation has now been established, namely that online video viewing is not a major time commitment. People are more likely to give you three minutes rather than five minutes.
3. The online video world will become increasingly competitive. It's not enough to just do online video. It needs to be remarkable in some way to stand out from the other billion videos.
   

Tracking the growth of blogs

I've been interested in the growth of blogs and keep track of Technorati's updates. Every several months they come out with a new "state of the blogosphere" with very interesting information about blogs. Here's the most recent report.

I'll show some of the highlights from the report below, but I'm especially interested in this list of blog growth according to Technorati's previous reports:

Worldwide Blog Growth:

• January 2004 – less than 2 million blogs
• July 2004 – 3.5 million
• January 2005 – 6 million
• July 2005 – 12 million
• January 2006 – 24 million
• July 2006 – 50 million
• October 2006 – 57 million
• March 2007 – 70 million

The sheer growth in 2006 alone is unbelievable. There are some equally unbelievable numbers and data in this most recent report. Here are the highlights:

• 70 million weblogs now
  
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or...
• 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or...
• 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%
• Italian fourth at 3%
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February

So just think, in the time it took you to read this post 63 new blogs were created and 765 new blog posts were written but you probably can't read over a third of them because they were in Japanese. Seems to me, translators like Babel Fish are going to be increasingly important.

Second Life's unbelievable growth

A few weeks ago I was completing my article for OutreachMagazine.com about the ministry opportunities within Second Life. It had been a while since I checked the growth and what I found were some unbelievable stats. Last July I wrote about Second Life and at that time they had about 200,000 "residents" so when I was doing the research for this article I thought the number was probably up around a million or so residents. Instead here's what I found:

October, 2006 - Second Life reached 1 million registered accounts
December, 2006 - 2 million registered accounts
January, 2007 - 3 million registered accounts
February, 2007 - 4 million registered accounts
March, 2007 - 5 million registered accounts
April 25 , 2007 - 5,858,000 registered accounts

Let me begin by apologizing. I really felt bad when I saw these numbers because I should have been paying closer attention over the last six months. I'd written about Second Life several times in the last few months but hadn't been tracking the amazing growth. So, I'm sorry to all seven of the MicroExplosion readers. Please forgive me.

Ok, now that that's behind us, let's look at this growth. It's truly astounding. They've been growing by one million registered accounts per month since October. At this rate they'll have 14 million registered accounts by January 2008.

And let's not fool ourselves into thinking that Second Life is the only virtual world out there either. There are two active virtual worlds/games for children ages 5 to 12. The first, Club Penguin has an average of 1.6 million children playing each month. Another virtual world for children, Webkinz, has an average of 870,000 children playing each month. In both cases, the numbers are growing: Webkinz had almost 2 million children playing in December, 2006 and Club Penguin had almost 3 million players in January, 2007.

So what does all of this mean? Well, at the very least virtual worlds are becoming quite the reality for an increasing number of the population. For businesses, this means there are literally new worlds to tap for growth (remember, Second Life has it's own form or currency). For churches and ministries, there are new places to connect with people for the message of the Gospel. This may very well be the beginning of new missions strategies, new outreach tools, and new methods of discipleship. I've heard it said many times that the message of the Gospel will never change but the methods for communicating it always will. Somehow I don't think the author of that statement had virtual worlds in mind...but I'm sure he would agree it applies here as much as anywhere.

Study: Women vs Men Online Video Views

I saw an interesting eMarketer.com story about how the numbers of men and women watching online video are quite different. You can check out the full article but the two graphs below were especially interesting. Also, check out this quote from the article: "This year there will be an estimated 97 million females online in the US, compared with 91 million males. A clear majority." Those are some incredible numbers (and a great reason why an Internet strategy should be important to you.)

Here are the graphs:

Stats: Worldwide blog count & daily web video views

On Monday I had the opportunity to talk to two groups about how understanding web 2.0 can help their organizations. The first group I spoke to were the good people at Katcher, Vaughn, and Bailey, a PR firm in Nashville (thanks for the invitation Steve). The second group was the marketing department and some editorial staff at Randall House, a publishing company here in town.

In both cases I gave an overview of the six categories of web 2.0...the "massive Volkswagon" acronym MASSVW. We also discussed some additional terms like RSS, wiki, AJAX, and tags. One of the things that seemed to get everyone's attention were some stats about blogs and online video. You may find them interesting too if you haven't seen any recently. Here's the breakdown on both with the data I had:

Worldwide Blogs Count (source Technorati)

• Jan. 2004 - less than 2 million
• Jan. 2005 - 6 million
• Jan. 2006 - 24 million
• July 2006 - 50 million
• Jan. 2007 - 60+ million

Online Video - Average number of views per day (source ComScore)

• Oct. 2005 - less than 25 million
• Jan. 2006 - 125 million
• July 2006 - 700 million

I haven't seen any more recent data than July 2006 but I wouldn't be surprised to see that Jan. 2007 online video views reached 1 billion per day.

So what does this mean for you? First, if you're not one of the 60 million bloggers you might want to consider starting one. Blog writers are blog readers and the number of people who will read your blog is higher now that it's ever been. Second, how are you using online video to help you? Are you creating opportunities for people to embed any video you put online? If you're not, you are missing a tremendous opportunity.