Over the holiday weekend the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released data showing that 24% of internet users have placed calls online, up from 8% of internet users in 2007.
The precise wording of the question was:
“Please tell me if you ever use the internet to make a phone call online, using a service such as Skype or Vonage? Did you happen to do this yesterday, or not?” This was the first time that we asked the question and specifically referred to Skype, the popular global service that was recently purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 billion.
Unclear from the press release was whether or not the researchers at Pew indicated that triple play TV/Internet/Phone service from Cable/MSO companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable also count as “making phone calls online,” and if they did not then the number could spike higher than 24%.
This report is in keeping with a bunch of other recent findings about folks abandoning legacy land lines in favor of mobile-only, the ongoing debate about whether “cord cutting” in favor of IPTV services is a present or future danger to MSOs, and a general trend toward what my friend Shelly Palmer calls “WIW WIW WIW” (or “Wee Wee Wee” a la “This Little Piggy…”) — that is, “what I want, when I want it, where I want it.”
What it means for the advertising industry: whether it’s making calls online, catching a favorite show on Hulu rather than via the cable box, or accessing current events through Google News rather than a newspaper, internet users won’t stay with a channel just because they used it in the past or because their parents used it. To paraphrase the old Playtex campaign: this is not your mother’s media landscape.
Advertisers, particularly digital ones, have to work harder, longer and smarter to get messages in front of an audience that used to come as easy ride alongs to content. And this squares nicely with the fact that TV advertising is having a banner year and that eMarketer — among others –predicts it will continue to grow through the Olympics and Presidential election of 2012 and then taper off.
TV is still the best bet for reaching a mass audience, but that bet gets a little worse with each passing quarter.
Nobody knows when, but we’ll soon reach a tipping point where it costs less and is just as easy for users to get high-interest TV content over the internet. In 2012 NBC won’t alienate its conventional advertisers by creating something like the “ESPN on Xbox” experience.
But what about 2016?
Imagine if Microsoft used display inventory on its newly-acquired Skype platform to advertise that users can get access to all the Olympic coverage on the Xbox as part of a Gold membership? We know that something like this is coming given that Microsoft made a play for Conan O’Brien to host his new talk show on the Xbox platform before O’Brien went with TBS.
It’s not a matter of “if?” It’s a matter of “when?” And the answer is “soon.”
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