Broadband Penetration Growing

In addition to widespread availability of Flash and other content plugins, broadband internet access is important to much of the video and other high-demand content being produced today. Luckily, according to this article, broadband has reached 78% penetration, up from 65% a year ago. Not surprisingly, broadband users spend 33% more time online and visit twice as many pages.

Online Treasure Hunt for Dominos

An online scavenger hunt that leads consumers to the chance to buy high priced tech items on Ebay for $9.99 was created to promote a $9.99 pizza deal for Dominos pizza. It is one of the recent campaigns Dominos has been using to improve their reach to online markets. Said a spokesman, "Online is becoming a bigger part of our marketing arsenal, Much of our core target audience is online and prefers to get information that way." A company that gets it... I love it!

Flash Support for site visitors

For many years I resisted building sites that required proprietary plugins like Flash. But as the plugins began shipping with browsers it began to gain wider acceptance. Now, thanks in part to YouTube, MySpace and Yahoo, adoption rates for Flash 8 are at 90% only 12 months following launch. Flash 9 was released in July and already has a 40% adoption rate. While I think Flash can be done better than it often is, I think it is an excellent solution where its use is appropriate.

More than 10 hours per day!

And I thought I spent a lot of time online. "Teen life has become a theatrical, self-directed media production." Phone AND email are out... the average teen is in almost constant contact with their friends, IMing an average of 35 people a week. Weren't people saying that kids these days aren't as social as they were "back then?"

Corporate Censorship of Social Networks

In addition to simply not understanding the concept, companies such as CBS are also not understanding the audience. YouTube and MySpace have long resisted doing anything that might drive users away, because without their users, they are nothing. But the cost of running YouTube in particular became too great and they have begun allowing sponsorship. A deal with CBS brought their content to the site, but at a cost of editorial control over the site and site content. CBS has been filtering and vetting comments, and got all the comments moved to a page linked from the video page. They are "just trying to give users a nicer experience" but what they fail to see is that the site is extremely successful as it is. With few exceptions, no one was asking for a nicer experience according to CBS. There are other video sites (pick type: "rank") popping up. Some of them may be seeing an increase in traffic in the months to come.