Panel: What are People Really Doing on the Web?

Moderator: Joel Greenberg Sr Planner, GSD&M

Holland Hofma Brown VP Internet Panel Mgmt, Harris Interactive
Joel Greenberg Sr Planner, GSD&M
Michele Madansky VP Corp & Sales Research, Yahoo!
Max Kalehoff VP Mktg, Nielsen BuzzMetrics

General comments from session:

• The Internet is now a way of life. A majority of poll respondents say they “can’t live without it.”
• One in three respondents say the Internet is their primary source of news, however, TV and newspapers are viewed as more trustworthy than Web sources
• Only three percent of SXSW attendees responding to a poll say they trust TV news
• Only 25 percent feel extremely or very comfortable with sharing private information via the Web
• The Web is regarded by a majority of respondents as their primary means of staying connected
• More men than women read blogs, and as expected, the younger demographic dominates the Blogosphere
• While blog usage generally decreases with age, 29 percent of males and females over age 65 read blogs
• Blogs are viewed as valuable for reading others’ opinions, for entertainment, to keep abreast of current affairs, and for family contact. However, most people are selective about the blogs they visit, limiting visits to only a handful
• Among the general population, personal diaries lead the list of what is being read
• Most respondents say that content is more important than the way a blog looks
• About ten percent of the general population is writing blogs; with men and women writing at about the same rate
• Fully three-fourths of blog writers write about themselves
• Yahoo gets 2 terabytes of usage data every day, which exceeds the amount of information stored in the Library of Congress
• Mobile phones are increasingly important for information delivery and retrieval (this point has been cited by several SXSW panelists.) This is especially true outside the United States
• On-line gaming is important globally
• Communication remains the killer app globally (IM, e-mail, SMS)
• The global food industry has been most impacted by grassroots/viral activity by Web users
• Video clips work especially well in swaying skeptical people (e.g. engineering types)

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2005 found that traditional institutions (government, media, business) are declining as sources preceived by the public as being trustworthy, supplanted by an increasing public trust in “people just like me.”