Internet is a champion

The World Wide Web is taking over not only newspapers, but also television

What over the past ten years was seen as a thing, although not so distant, but still of the future, is now becoming a reality: people are increasingly choosing the Internet over traditional forms of mass media.

According to information provided to journalists last month in Shanghai at the HP Mobility Forum, the Internet, which began in 1999 with an audience of just over 500 million people, has now reached 2 billion and is almost as popular as television. If we add to this another billion fans of video games (which have also become a medium for the dissemination of mass media - if not news, then certainly advertising), it turns out that computers in the media industry already play a more important role than television receivers.

Not only does Russia keep up with global trends, it is ahead of the rest of the world. Only 30% of our fellow citizens use television as a source of news (for 26%, a working TV is the background of their existence; in other words, although people do not turn off the “box”, they do not pay special attention to it), but every second Internet user is busy making own information content. Or, as they say now, content. However, we should make a reservation: we are talking only about those of us who have access to the Internet. This and other interesting information was obtained during the study “Main trends and changes in preferences for the use of media in Russia”, carried out by the IBM Institute for Business Value together with the Romir research holding. More than 1,120 people (67% men and 33% women) of various ages and social status in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities of Russia were interviewed.

The phenomenon of the Internet as an increasingly preferred medium for the distribution of mass information by the public manifests itself in two ways. On the one hand, the Internet is technologically convenient: a user of the World Wide Web is not tied to a broadcast network, like a TV viewer or radio listener, and at the same time, like a reader of paper media, is not deprived of the ability to access multimedia content. A typical example is sports broadcasts. Video recordings of goals from the next round of the football championship are much more comfortable to watch on sports.ru than to plan your leisure time for the broadcast time of “Football Review”. On the other hand, the Internet is turning journalism into a hobby thanks to the ease of publishing amateur-produced content. The results of this hobby differ from the industrial method of searching, processing and publishing news, like Boeing from an aircraft modeling club. However, in the genre in which, for example, Vladimir Alekseevich Gilyarovsky worked in the century before last, blogs of popular Russian web authors can and do compete with paper media.

By the way. “Thousanders” (the so-called bloggers with more than a thousand regular readers) are a uniquely Russian phenomenon. Unless, of course, you mean the blogs of those Western authors who were popular before they started blogging - such as Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, whose blog on the company's website is translated into ten languages, including Russian. Unlike Schwartz, most of our “thousanders” did not have any preliminary popularity. They found it on the RuNet. According to the IBM Institute for Business Value, in June 2007, among the 20 most visited resources on the Runet, eight did not have any other content other than what was created by the visitors themselves. Not all of these eight sites can be considered mass media, but there are no traditional media sites in the top twenty at all. Among the 20 most popular English-language resources, the picture is somewhat different - for eight of them (Youtube, Myspace, etc.) the content is produced by users themselves, but in 20th place is still the BBC web representation. The first line of the English-language rating belongs to Yahoo, and this portal, although not considered a media outlet, abundantly publishes news from the world's leading news agencies. Just like Mail.ru, the leader in the Runet, which, without pampering visitors with a variety of sources, sells professional news providers (now it is RBC, and before there was the online newspaper “Vzglyad”) the best place on its start page.

Television, which remains the main media medium both in the world and in Russia, is used as a source of news by only 2% of our fellow citizens with access to the Internet. The rest watch TV just for entertainment. On the Internet, by contrast, the vast majority of users are looking for news. Depending on age, from 93 (from 15 to 24 years) to 98% (from 40 to 60 years) are engaged in this activity. It is difficult to interpret this circumstance other than as a local victory of the Internet over television. The general trend, however, is that the more time people spend online, the less they use traditional media as a news source.

The problem is that on RuNet users strive to produce content themselves. Half of the respondents either blog or have their own website. Another 11% are devoted to multiplayer online games with 3D graphics, and this is also a full-fledged form of communication, taking away the time people previously devoted to books, television, magazines and newspapers.

The enthusiasm shown by hobbyists for the online publication of their creative work is being successfully exploited commercially. Andreas Neus, head of Media & Entertainment at the IBM Institute for Business Value, who presented the results of the study, gave an example: an advertising video produced by the winner of an online competition cost the customer, Sony, $2,000. According to experts, the product is of the same quality , produced by a professional studio, would cost two orders of magnitude more.

It is too early for journalists to fear an invasion of bloggers. Today, amateurs cannot replace a regular army of stringers, correspondents and editors. But they can catch professionals making mistakes, and also make up for the shortage of news reported by professionals. However, on the technological side of things, the trend is quite clear: news distributed online is consumed better than news printed on paper or broadcast over the airwaves. Traditional media that do not pay attention to this will be beaten even by bloggers as soon as today’s Internet-accustomed teenagers grow up.

Andrey ANNENKOV, “Profile”, - specially for “Vremya Novostey”