Ofcom report signals that Britain has been taken over by a digital Revolution
September 5, 2007 Posted by Matt in : Bristol , trackback
The Montage Team was interested, but not surprised, to read on BBC Online’s latest news this week, that the net, mobile phones and MP3 players are revolutionising how Britons spend their time.This latest news is revealed in Ofcom’s annual report and reports that older media such as TV, radio and even DVDs are being abandoned in favour of more modern technology.
It also shows that women, in some age groups, are the dominant web users and older web users spend more time online than any group.
Among children it showed that web and mobile phone use is growing at the expense of video games.
The 330-page report takes a comprehensive look at the way Britons use new and old media and reveals a nation in love with its media, gadgets and hi-tech gear. To save you time the Montage team has picked out the headlines from the report!
The statistics are pretty shocking, the average Briton now spends 50 hours per week on the phone, using the net, watching TV or listening to the radio. However, the mix of how much time is spent on each one has changed radically over the last few years.
Daily mobile phone use is up 58% on 2002 and, over the same period, net use has grown 158%. By contrast Britons spend far less time watching TV, listening to the radio or chatting on a fixed line phone.
The report, the fourth annual survey from Ofcom, revealed big differences in the technologies that different sectors of the population prefer.
The headline stats that the Montage team have pulled out of the report are:
- Among Britons aged 25-34, women account for 55% of the time this group spends online (mostly on Ebay!)
- For first half of 2007 90% of UKsingles sales by volume came from digital downloads to the computer or a mobile handset.
- 16% of Britons aged 65+ spend 42 hours per month online - more than any other age group
- More than 75% of 11 year olds have their own TV, games console and mobile phone
- 15% of 13-15 year olds and 7% of 10 year olds have their own webcam
Analysis of time spent online reveals that Britain is a nation of shoppers and social networkers. More time was spent on eBay than on any other web site, and social networking sites Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are all in the top ten sites by time spent.
The impact of widening participation in the creation of user-generated content can be seen from the sixfold growth in the three years to October 2006 in the number of articles available to consumers on Wikipedia, The worldwide community of ‘producers’ has grown significantly since the site was first founded, with nearly 40,000 users worldwide making at least five edits a month on Wikipedia by October 2006.
The web 2.0 revolution has taken a pace with 1,845 new articles appearing daily on Wikipedia, 3,744,000 new photos are uploaded to Flickr and 65,000 new video clips are loaded onto YouTube. Assuming an average YouTube clip length of 30 seconds, 542 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day – a year’s worth of new video appearing on the site every sixteen days!
In the seven months to May 2007, the monthly UK unique user base of YouTube increased by nearly a half to 6.5 million users, while Wikipedia’s increased by 30% to 6.4 million. MySpace’s audience has increased by 25% since November 2006, and FaceBook’s user base has quadrupled since October 2006. The one exception to the pattern of rising popularity is Flickr, whose audience in the UK appears to have stabilised at just under a million unique users every month.
Author - Aime Southgate
Comments»
Access to the internet is becoming more of a human right rather than a luxury. Without the equipment and access to the internet people in the UK can suffer economically. It's another reason why people should recycle old computers!