Europeans and newspaper websites

I thought the internet was supposed to kill the newspaper, but the public’s desire for a newspaper service – albeit a digital one – is still going strong, judging by statistics that caught my eye recently.

That’s not, of course, the same as saying things are easy for individual newspapers – if that were the case there would be no need for Newspaper Death Watch – and even some supposedly progressive online-only models are faltering.

Nonetheless, it’s striking that nearly half of Europe’s 380 million internet users visited a newspaper website in November 2011, according to online analysts ComScore.

Social networking – it’s a social world

ComScore’s A Social World is another entry in the ‘gosh, isn’t social media popular’ canon.

Released in the week before Christmas, the report (subtitled Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It’s Headed) is a snapshot of the growth of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et al over the last five years.

It encapsulates this in the fact that social networking use has more than tripled in the last few years – in March 2007 it accounted for 6% of time spent online, by October 2011 it accounted for 19%.

2011 – a partial and incomplete review

End of year reviews are many and range from the heavyweight and the slightly less high brow. This post is definitely closer to the latter.

Rather than present a well-researched roundup of 2011′s top trends in social media and technology news, I’ve collected a handful of the year’s features that stood out for me.

(You could even see it as a stitched-together list of blog posts from the past 12 months that I didn’t get around to finishing …)

Internet use in Britain in 2011

This week the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) released its 2011 survey of users and non-users of the internet in Britain (HT: AnneMarie Cunningham).

Focusing on the emergence of “next generation users” in Britain, it estimated 44 per cent of those online in Britain use multiple devices, including smart phones, tablets or readers to access the internet.

Noting that next generation users can be found in all age groups, OII cites dramatic shifts over the last year in the portability and range of devices available as the key drivers behind this emerging change.

Social media and India

The Next Web recently unearthed an interesting video by Nielsen on social media use in India.

That social media use is on the increase, in India as elsewhere, is hardly headline news. But it is worth dwelling on its speed and direction.

How the UK uses social media (infographic)

Nearly two thirds of adults in the UK use social media in one form or another, according to a new study.

Opinium Research polled more than 4,000 adults for a ‘UK Social Media Census’ (the research was carried out at the same time as the UK’s official census in March).

The study, for PR consultancy Lansons*, found 61% of people said they used social media and identified ‘connectors’ – those with social media profiles who want to find others, or be found, online – as the most numerous of nine types of user.