New Media Consumption: Where are All the Readers Going?

JARspeaks

New Media Consumption: Where are All the Readers Going?

happy newspaper During the last few years we’ve seen the steady decline of one of the world’s greatest media - print. I’m not going to be long-winded on this, I’m going to do a big blog post later that will go a bit more in depth, but while doing my research for that article, I found something really interesting that I thought I’d share with all of you.

If you use google trends to capture some global search information about print media, you’ll find that the broad searches for magazines and newspapers have declined hugely since 2004. But, searches for blogs have increased drastically. When you combine all searches for magazines, newspapers, and blogs, you find that global search is exactly the same as it’s always been.

What’s that all mean? I’m not completely sure yet. But, one conclusion that could be drawn is that blogs are replacing magazines and newspapers almost 1:1, which would indicate that media is democratizing. People are making more specific selections about what they want to read, rather than going to “traditional” or semi-local news sources.

Such conclusions are hard to disagree with, as we begin to see the advent of high-traffic ideological online sources like Daily Kos or Pajama’s Media or more granular blogs about subjects like Celebrities, fashion, movie reviews, and more. What’s more these blogs provide more timely information than any magazine could possibly offer. Anyhow, below are my normalized results output by Google trends.

Key

Do you think these trends are an indication of things to come? What do you think will happen in publishing in the future? Leave your comments below.

Joshua Unseth | March 17, 2010 | Comments (7) | Categories: Market Research, SEO

Very interesting obserations. Looking forward to hearing more about this topic.

Nick | March 17, 2010
Nice find… although the term ‘democratization’ kind of gives me the heebie jeebies. What’s certain is that barriers to entry are now virtually non-existent, resulting in unprecedented consumer choice. And, of course, choice is usually a good thing… when exercised toward the right ends.

Christopher W McAuliffe | March 17, 2010
Regional/local focus has likely moved to ideological/interest area focus. There will always be the readers of the sports or arts sections who ignore the front page. Ideological readers can now access news that was only partially there before, especially the conservative reader. Unfortunately, even the alien abductees can also find anthing they may have imagined to be true in the past.

Andy William | March 17, 2010
Fascinating food for thought

Matt | March 18, 2010
Yes, people read, short stories, articles, paragraphs. Short attention spans is what is in, we don’t stay tuned for long periods of time.

One blog I know of has more than 1,000 posts but no one has time to read even 100 of em. So less is more; short is sweet; and overkill is out. But the reality is that I don’t comment much since 99% of blogs are NOFOLLOW (which is just greedy).

I know I’m rambling, but I guess my point is that short, well-created “blog” content is the future of this business.

The Chaos Creator™ | March 18, 2010
Very interesting, Joshua. The fragmentation of media is pretty neat to witness. I think print publishing will probably move into more op-ed or research/academic-oriented material. Since they can’t beat the blogs on speed, they can beat em’ with expertise.

Lily | March 18, 2010
I think Andy’s comment on ideological readers is really interesting and could reveal a lot about why people are google-searching in the first place. There are so many blogs that a search will give a ton of similar blogs too. Other than a few big ones like Huffington Post, I don’t think people generally take most blogs as the final word on an issue. Reading one might lead to reading a bunch. But perhaps when one searches for a magazine or newspaper it doesn’t lead to quite info-chase.

Meredith | March 20, 2010