Over the past few weeks I’ve talked about the (UK) Ofcom study showing that TV is the most essential medium for consumers, and the (US) Pew Research one showing that the TV set is becoming less important.  The take out once you look at both is that the delivery mechanism doesn’t matter so much, but people still want much of the same content.

The same conclusion can be drawn from the most recent piece of Pew Research, showing that even while newspapers are shedding readers, more and more Americans are getting their news online.  Pew found that nearly half (46%) of Americans get their news online at least three days a week, up from 29% in 2004.

News searches up, while overall search down
The recent Nielsen stats showed a fairly hefty 16% year on year decrease in US search volumes.   However, Pew found that 34% of the Internet going public still employ search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing three days a week to search for news.  This is triple the number that did so in 2004.

This might give credence to the theory that social media has meant more people getting recommendations for products and places to go from friends, but when it comes to looking for things trending in the news, search still rules.

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Graham Holliday who blogs from Rwanda has published this excellent presentation about he disseminates information using free tools and a patchy, expensive Internet connection.

As they say necessity is the mother of invention and Graham has found some simple, but effective ways of getting the word out.   Definitely worth a read through and something the more broadband rich among us can learn from.

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This is a short post for the forthcoming Cow Digital digest, which Louise Doherty and myself put together every week.  Sign up for it here!

According to Google, the fastest growing search terms for 2009 so far have been Michael Jackson, Facebook and Tuenti, the latter being a leading Spanish social network.   Meanwhile the top three searches for Microsoft’s search engine ‘Bing’, are likewise Michael Jackson and Facebook, with Swine Flu in third place.

Perhaps of more interest is Google’s list of fast falling searches.  Barack Obama, Amy Winehouse and Heath Ledger all figure.  

So, perhaps worryingly for the brands in question do video sharing site Daily Motion, social network Bebo and Nintendo’s game console, the wii.

Search engines make you smarter, so say researchers from Penn State University (via Science Daily).    Well…kind of.   But they don’t make you stupid as Nicholas Carr claimed in his seminal Atlantic Magazine article last year.

Researchers looked at search habits of 72 participants engaging in 426 tasks.   Rather than search being used to find out new stuff, search engines were “primarily used for fact checking users’ own internal knowledge.”   According to the academics, that means that search is actually part of our own internal learning process.

Hence the fears about students for example getting lazy and just using Google rather than their brains to find out answers might be incorrect.  Instead, Google, Bing et al support “higher level information needs”, i.e to increase the chances that we get the right answer and to put detail on things we already know.

That makes sense if you look at how search habits are evolving, in particular lengthening.   Last week Hitwise’s Asia-Pacific analyst Alan Long put out a post on lengthening search terms.   Something that Hitwise says is an international trend – one and two word searches have gone down over the past three years and 3+ word searches have gone up.

People already have a fair idea of what they are after when they go to search, hence more specific searches.  As a result, search is as much to validate and build on existing knowledge as to find new one.

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The other day I posted about what marketing agencies see as a measure of viral video success. Unbelievably over a quarter peg the success rate at a million views or more, which to me seems like a case of taking the big number and plucking it out of thin air.

Why? Because getting up to 50k is an achievement given the thousands of brand films that languish on YouTube with several hundred views.

As new research from TubeMogul shows, even though video sharing sites host the actual films, less than half (45%) of us now discover content by browsing through these sites. Which could be why ‘featured’ clips on YouTube used to get 500,000 views, but now often don’t reach 100,000.

Where does the other 55% come from?

Search engines: 11.18%,
Social networks: 3.66%,
Social bookmarking sites: 3.19%,
Video search engines: 0.63%,
Email/IM: 0.05%

“Everything else (almost all blogs, from the thousands we scanned): 80.88% of all referred traffic.”

In other words, forget about seeding your video on specialist video search engines, or hoping people will forward it on by email. Blogs and online media are the key to success. Or, according to TubeMogul:

”These results likely come as bad news to the myriad sites that are set up with online video discovery in mind, such as video search engines, which source a relatively modest 0.63% of all referred video views.

”To those trying to unlock a formula for making a video go viral, perhaps this gives some clues: reach out to bloggers and optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.”

Image – Kimba