In Europe’s largest economies, at any time of day, access to the Internet is mostly made using a computer.  If we look at Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the UK we can see that 95.1% of all browser-based page views are made from a computer (as measured by comScore).  “Smartphones” (mobile phones capable of Internet connection) account for 3.2% of traffic and “Tablet” computers make up just 1.4% of browser-based Internet page views.  So for the majority of people in those five European countries a computer, whether based at work or in the home, is still the chosen device for viewing web pages.  This is an area that Google still dominates because of the importance of search activity when a computer is used for Internet access.  But, as you can see by looking at the data in this chart, things are starting to change.  I’ve been trawling through a recently published report about Internet connections using smartphones and tablets published by comScore (Connected Europe).  This forms the basis for this month’s analysis and provides the basic data for the PowerPoint chart.

In some parts of Europe smartphone ownership now reaches almost 50 per cent of the mobile phone population; with Spain leading at 48.4% and the UK close behind at 48.1%.  In Italy smartphone ownership has reached 42.1% and in France it is now 38.1%.  Germany has the lowest proportion of smartphones at 38.1% according to comScore.  Looking at the data in the left hand chart on the PowerPoint slide, it’s obvious that the leading smartphone is still Apple’s iPhone.  At present Apple holds the position of the most used mobile phone device to connect to the Internet at 29.5%, but Google’s Android platform is catching up in second place at 22%.  Remember, this data is based on people’s actual usage of the devices and not on the sales data that is frequently used to measure market share.  The supremacy of Apple’s iPhone as the dominant smartphone is well-known, as also is the fact that in sheer sales numbers Google’s Android is catching up.  This is primarily because the second largest global manufacturer of mobile phones after Nokia is Samsung and an increasing number of Samsung’s mobile phones are smartphones using Google’s Android platform.  In sales numbers Samsung is by some estimates still ahead of Apple in the total quantity of smartphones sold throughout 2011, although Apple was the winner in the last quarter of that year.

Samsung and Apple have a curious relationship best described by the word “frenemy” a term used to describe a company which is both a friend and an enemy or competitor at the same time.  On one hand Samsung produces the microprocessors that power many Apple products, and on the other hand Samsung is being aggressively pursued by Apple about a number of patent disputes in various countries.  These disputes are having the effect of blocking Samsung sales of Android-based tablets in those countries.  Looking at the comScore usage data, Apple’s tactic seems to be proving very effective in delaying the growth of European Android-based tablet usage.  In Europe Apple’s digital traffic to web pages is split equally between their iPhones and their iPads with a smaller amount of traffic coming from the iPod Touch.  By comparison Android-usage in Europe is virtually all derived from smartphone usage and only a tiny proportion comes from Android-based tablets.  This is the area of key weakness for Google because Apple is already forecasting that the volume of tablets purchased will eventually exceed the volume of personal computers.

The patent disputes between Apple and Samsung are only part of the explanation for the difference in European tablet usage.  The primary, and to me obvious, reason for Apple’s success is that it provides consumers with a highly integrated and holistically positive customer experience that unifies Apple’s hardware and software products tightly into their cloud-based services.  This easy fusion is something that Google’s Android system has yet to effectively replicate.  At present it is nowhere near the rapidly maturing Apple eco-system.  The real question now is whether it is actually possible for Google to develop and build a competing system which will combine its hardware, software and cloud services to produce a system that is a pleasure to use.  One industry insider argues that Google’s Android platform is so fragmented that Google has already lost control of it.  It is the tight control of all the elements of hardware, software and services that Apple has used from the beginning (thanks to Steve Job’s vision and Sir Jonathan Ive’s design genius) to successfully create the high levels of positive customer experience that Google’s Android lacks.

Google has a poor record of visual interface design and little experience of hardware product design.  This lack of hardware design capability is one possible explanation, beyond the acquisition of patents, for Google’s recent purchase of Motorola’s mobile phone division for $2.5 billion.  Indeed, as I write this, Motorola has just won an injunction in German courts against Apple. This may help to justify what looks like an increasingly dubious purchase by Google.  In fact we are not many days away from an EU Commission decision about whether to allow Google’s takeover of Motorola’s mobile division within Europe.  But regardless of the outcome of the legal battles, and whether the EU Commission blocks or doesn’t block Google’s purchase of Motorola’s mobile division, the digital traffic figures from devices clearly shows that consumers favour the easy to use integrated hardware, with its strong aesthetic design, and services created by Apple.

This seamless fusion of product didn’t happen overnight: Apple began its path towards this service integration over 12 years ago, back in January 2000, with the launch of iTools, and it followed on in January 2001 with the launch of iTunes.  Apple’s latest incarnation, iCloud, incorporates all types of personal content and synchronises this content easily between different Apple hardware devices.  iCloud merges computer, smartphone and tablet, and audio and visual files, relatively easily and it is highly likely that TV content will soon be added as well.  This is exactly what consumers want which is shown very clearly by the data used in the right hand chart on the PowerPoint slide.  This data is taken from the European share of device traffic on a typical weekday, in this case on Wednesday 7^th December 2011.

As I’ve previously mentioned, in absolute terms computers represent 95.1% of all browser-based web page traffic.  But the figures used to produce the right hand chart are the percentage by hour for each device of the overall traffic from that device.  This has the effect of collapsing the data to make comparisons easier.  The chart clearly shows that having a seamlessly integrated service is becoming increasingly essential for many people.  All three devices: computers, mobile phones and tablets, are used throughout the day but their peak usage times vary to fit consumer lifestyles.  During the morning journey to work the three devices are used fairly equally, but just after 9am the level of access to the Web by mobile and tablet drops and computer usage rises, and continues to rise to a lunch-time peak.  It then gradually falls away during the afternoon.  By mid-afternoon mobile, and then tablet, Internet browsing increases. Then, as the working day ends at around 6pm and people are travelling home, mobile Internet usage peaks.  Tablets are also used during the evening commuting period and their use rises, and reaches a peak, just after 9pm in the evening.

What all this usage data demonstrates is just how perfectly Apple’s product and service strategy has come together over the last dozen years, and how well this meshes with consumer behaviour.  If and when Apple launches its new TV service expect a graceful integration with its iPad tablet.  Already tablet usage peaks exactly when TV viewing peaks.  In a few months it is likely that many people will be using their iPads to control the content they watch on their TVs.  And, according to rumour, some may even be using an Apple TV.  Will Google’s Android platform ever be able to match and exceed Apple’s tightly integrated eco-system?  Until I start seeing reliable behavioural data showing that Google’s Android tablet usage approximately equals mobile phone use, just like the Apple data in the left hand chart, then, and only then, will I believe it’s possible.

The chart shows the percentage of homes which now possess two electronic TV-related devices; one device is a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) sometimes also called a Personal Video recorder (PVR), the other is a Connected TV, or Smart TV.  The data shows that in several countries the DVR is now reaching, or has already reached, the critical 30 per cent barrier.  When electronic devices reach this number of homes they often go on to become widely-adopted mainstream devices.  The adoption of DVRs has been remarkably rapid as these devices are expensive, and they were not commonly available until around the turn of this century.  DVRs are primarily digital TV receivers with lots of hard disk storage, and their main function is to “time-shift” TV viewing.  DVRs were the first of several TV technologies which have liberated viewers so that they are free to watch the programs they want to watch when they want to watch them.  Broadcasters and the audience measurement companies have been slow to respond to this situation.  One of the key factors about digital technology is that it completely changes the concept of broadcasting as the content can be accessed at any time.  And I mean any time:  I’ve just watched two TV programs, one that was transmitted a year ago, and one that was broadcast over three years ago.  I’ve also recently viewed my favourite TV ad of all time which was originally broadcast nearly 60 years ago, courtesy of YouTube.  The extent of this possible time span is clearly not considered by broadcasters when they make the decision to broadcast the particular type of content, and the original format in which the program is created.  This is primarily, of course, because the audience measurement systems currently used are based on the premise that virtually all TV viewing takes place within seven days of a program or commercial being transmitted.  This premise is totally at odds with the reality that all TV content now exists in a digital world.  A world where TV content is as likely to be viewed streamed to a mobile phone, viewed on a laptop, or on a games machine, or on a tablet computer like an iPad as on an actual TV.  What’s more this content will have been sourced from the Internet, DVD, or a hard disk, over surprisingly extended periods of time.  And none of this will be related to the time the original content was produced.

The second device featured on the chart shows the percentage of the uptake of a much more recent addition in some homes, the Smart TV.  This is the generic name given to any Internet connected TV.  These are “converged” devices that have only been commonly available since 2010.  Their primary purpose is to allow Web video streaming to be viewed on a large screen as well, of course, as other digital TV viewing.  They have other uses as well, for example they enable web video chat and web browsing, but their main use is to provide the comfortable viewing of Web video in a “lean back” position from a comfortable chair.  What the data indicates is that while the United States led, and still leads, in the adoption of DVRs, the leading country for Smart TV adoption is France, where penetration has already reached 13 per cent.  At this rate of adoption, in a few years’ time France is likely to have more people watching Smart TVs than are using DVRs.

The big difference between these two devices is that a DVR shifts the time when broadcast viewing takes place whereas the Smart TV enables selection and streaming from a near infinite pool of video content available via the Web.  The TV industry has yet to adapt successfully to” time-shifted” viewing let alone the Web “streaming” future that will marginalise broadcasting.  Like other media trends before it broadcasting will not actually disappear but it will have to get used to not being so important.  So, how did you watch your TV over the Christmas holidays, was it broadcast, time-shifted or streamed?  My guess is that it was probably a mixture of all three, but your future Christmas viewing is likely to include much more streaming.

The study looked at children in three age groups: 5 to 7 years old; 8 to 11 years old; and 12 to 15 years old. The findings correlate with other research that I have seen and it clearly indicates that the total time children spend on media consumption increases with age.  By the time they’ve reached 12 to 15 years of age they are spending a staggering 50.4 hours per week consuming media, which is far more than the total time they spend at school.

The middle age group, 8 to 11 years of age, spend an equally impressive proportion of their waking hours (39.3 hours per week) consuming media.  But this group spends more time playing computer games (9.8 hours per week), than they do using the Internet (8 hours per week).

Even the youngest group, the 5 to 7 year olds, have a high total media consumption of no less than 32.1 hours a week.  This is when they are attending school for 30 hours each week and presumably (hopefully) during this period of their young lives they have early bedtimes.  Bedtimes not withstanding, children at this early age are already consuming 15 hours of television every week.  This slightly increases to 15.9 hours by the time they are 8 to 11 years old, but it then jumps up to 17.6 hours a week as they reach the age of 12 to 15.

Looking at the time the two younger age groups spend per week using the Internet, you can see it is secondary to the amount of time spent playing games.  Using the Internet only surpasses playing games when the curiosity and excitement surrounding puberty approaches.  As a fascination with sex becomes overwhelmingly important to the young adult, the time spent exploring social sites like Facebook increases as the time spent on playing games decreases.  This is especially apparent in boys whose enthusiasm for shoot-em-up games wanes as testosterone levels rise and interest in the opposite sex starts becoming paramount.

What I find really significant in the calculations I’ve deduced from the Ofcom data is the total amount of time each week that children spend exposed to different media.  It is extraordinary to reflect that none of this media existed before 1898 when Marconi started the mass production of radio sets in the town of Chelmsford in the UK.  Just over a 100 years is a mere blink in evolutionary time, and yet today, from the very earliest age, children are immersed in the virtual worlds of Television, Internet, Gaming and Radio for as much, if not more, time than they engage with the real world.  Even more striking is that for most of these children’s parents computer games and the Internet are comparatively recent inventions.  Computer games began to be popular in the 1980’s and the Internet only became widely available in 1994.  Yet now engagement with an artificial, but interactive, environment is so absorbing that the average 12 to 15 year old spends 25.2 hours a week playing games and online, sometimes doing both at the same time.  The Ofcom report reveals that this older age group are also more likely to be on their own (51%) or with friends but unsupervised (9%) and that no fewer than 28% of them will be playing games with total strangers.

Anyone analysing the games played online, and offline on X-Boxes and PlayStations, predominantly by boys, has cause to worry.  They are often extremely violent and misogynistic.  There is a great deal of academic research that correlates these virtual world activities with the later expression of aggression and violence in the real world.  If you feel brave enough, read this academic paper to gain a better understanding about this behaviour.  It’s a scary thought but these games are priming the next generation to subconsciously believe that being violent and aggressive, and contemptuous of females, is normal.  Couple this immersive brain-washing with the agitated and belligerent moods engendered by consuming sugar-laden products, like the heavily-advertised Colas specifically targeted at the young, and we can all see trouble ahead.  Perhaps this is something to bear in mind when shopping for the children’s Xmas presents this year?

I calculated this data from a fascinating October press release from comScore which showed that Turkey has, to quote, “the third most engaged online audience in Europe.”  To investigate this claim I used the comScore data to work out the average pages viewed per hour in each country.  This is a straight forward division of the average pages viewed per hour by the average hours spent online in each country.  In the chart, I’ve ranked the results in order, left to right, from the lowest number of pages per hour to the highest.  If we use the assumption used in Web Analytics, fewer web pages viewed per hour means that the visitors are more engaged with the page content.  In order to provide some context to the European data, I’ve also calculated the world wide number of Web pages viewed per hour.

The first interesting finding is that Europeans view more Web pages per hour than the global average, and they are also nearly 12% faster at viewing those Web pages than the global average.  This is around the figure that I would expect, as Europeans spent nearly 8% longer online during August compared to non-Europeans.  The world-wide-web (www) is very much a European baby. It was, as I’m sure most of you know, first conceived in 1989 at Cern on the French Swiss border by an Englishman, Sir Tim Berners Lee.   At this stage of the Web’s development the amount of time spent online per person per month is a pretty good indicator of Internet experience (i.e. the number of years, and how intensively, the person has been using the Internet).  In fact the more developed an Internet economy becomes, the more time is spent online.  Perhaps this explains why consumers in the United Kingdom spent an average of nearly 35 hours online in August, (more than anybody else in Europe), and two and a half times longer than consumers in Austria who spent an average of under 14 hours online, less than anybody else in Europe.

If you look at the dark red graph line on the chart you can see the great variation in time spent online across Europe.  One might reasonably expect that the more years spent online the faster will be each Web page viewing, but is this so?  Given that comScore’s data was based on the month of August, my first thought was to analyse it for any seasonal effect.  For example, there is an obvious difference between the cooler climate in Northern Europe and the hotter climate in Southern Europe.  The data seems to indicate that this may be a factor, but it also paints a confusing picture:  You can see that the Italians basking in sun-drenched Southern Europe in August only spent 15.8 hours online that month, but in equally hot Spain people spent no less than 23.9 hours online. Why the difference?

My second observation is how varied the number of web pages viewed per hour is throughout Europe.  In Spain they view 85 web pages per hour, while at the other end of the scale in Poland they view 116 web pages per hour.  So Polish consumers are viewing 36% more web pages per hour than Spanish consumers meaning that Poland’s actual “dwell time” per page or “on-page engagement” is about one third less than Spain’s.  Could this be a seasonal effect?  I don’t think this is likely because, after Spain, Norway, with its much cooler weather, has the slowest rate of viewing Web pages in Europe and Poland, which also has a Northern climate, has the fastest rate of viewing Web pages.

What this data clearly shows is that the United Kingdom stands out as the most engaged Internet audience in Europe.  The British spend the longest time online. They view the most Web pages, 3,205 in a month and, at the same time, they spend longer on each Web page than every other European country except Spain and Norway.  As comScore claims, the Turks certainly spend the third longest time online per month but they also have the second fastest rate of viewing Web pages of any European country.  By using the metric of web pages viewed per hour all we can safely conclude is that the attention span given to each Web page in aggregate is much shorter in Turkey than elsewhere.  Only Poland has a faster rate of viewing Web pages.  Also, to answer my earlier thought, there appears to be no statistical relationship between the amount of time spent online and the rate that Web pages are viewed.  For the technically minded the Pearson R co-efficient between the two sets of figures is -0.22 which indicates a weak negative relationship.  I conclude that evaluating attention span (or online engagement) is a complex phenomenon but it does not seem to be related to the actual time spent online.

The data used for this chart comes from a Cable & Telecommunications Association (CTAM) study carried out by Nielsen in the United States and released in August.  It shows that when it comes to accessing online video using mobile devices the greatest US consumer concern is that the service is provided free or at a very low cost.  So, faced with a list of attributes from which to choose, “social interaction” was noticeable as being rated as of the least concern by consumers – confounding the expectations of the TV experts.

Talking of experts, one might expect the United States to be leading the world in online TV viewing, but US cable providers are only now beginning to understand what’s happening, and getting in on the act, for example Turner Broadcasting have now got TV Everywhere.  It’s the United Kingdom that’s setting the trend.  For several years now UK citizens have been able to access “catch-up TV and radio” via the BBC’s iPlayer.  Over several iterations of the software, people have grown accustomed to being able to either stream or download and then view high quality images from a large number of TV programs.  In fact, using the iPlayer in the UK is so popular that by way of comparison for the same month, December 2010, there were 145 million requests for programmes to be streamed or downloaded.  Part of this success is obviously due to the BBC’s iPlayer being available on a wide range of devices.  It already works on over 300 connected TV & Blu-Ray players and that number of devices continues to grow. Only last July the BBC iPlayer became available to use on Playstation 3 games consoles in the UK and work is continuing on adapting the iPlayer for a range of other set top boxes.  As well as this level of accessibility, another major contributing factor to the success of the iPlayer is that online access to the service is free within the UK.

In September the iPlayer service became available for international visitors who have an Apple iPad, the premier mobile device, as BBC Worldwide (the commercial arm of the BBC) rolled out the service to 11 European countries. This has to represent one of the best value subscriptions for the Apple iPad as the cost works out at just £44 per year and this provides access to many of the thousands of high quality programs and films that the BBC transmits or, indeed, has transmitted.  The one limitation affecting those outside the UK is that they have no option to download the program and view offline – the content is only available for streaming when online.  Despite this, however, international subscribers get a really good deal including access to a range of older programs that are not available to people living in the UK.  The BBC is funded by a license, costing £145.50 per year, which must be paid by anybody within the UK who owns a TV set.  Most of these TV license payers are not aware that international iPlayer subscribers get access to some older BBC programs that they cannot access themselves.  It seems highly likely that as this becomes more widely known, the BBC will be forced to provide the same content to UK TV License payers.

On the basis of the data from this chart BBC Worldwide appears to have made a good pricing decision:  The subscription for the iPlayer service for Europeans equates to a very reasonable 50 euros per year. If this ever gets rolled out globally that cost would be around $68 in the US.  At that rate, international consumers who can understand English will surely value the iPlayer very highly compared to any other mobile video services.  As this Nielsen research clearly shows, the attributes that US consumers consider very important are already available today using the BBC iPlayer software and as this article indicates those consumers are more likely to be using as hardware an Apple iPad.

I’ve come across several top executives in multi-national companies who ought to know better but who nevertheless take a totally Western-centric view of “market maturity.”  This out-dated model is based on the concept that whatever product or service is developed and accepted in the United States will find similar acceptance in Europe.  And this naive presumption is then extended to embrace Asia: as the Asian markets “mature”, surely Asians will adopt behaviours and lifestyles similar to the West, albeit with some local variation?  You may have already come across the word “glocal” to describe this phenomenon where the basic product or service emanating from the USA remains essentially the same worldwide with a little modification for Europe, and then some further modification to suit the Asian culture.  Glocal is the term often used to describe the marketing strategy behind American multi-nationals like McDonald’s.  You can clearly see this concept at work by comparing the McDonald’s US offering here, its European version with a little modification here, and the appropriately named Chicken Maharajar-Mac available in India.  Please note, that in order to get a good comparison I haven’t used the ubiquitous McDonald’s hamburger.  This wouldn’t be appropriate in a country like India where the cow is a sacred animal which, in a way, makes the point very clearly.  However much one tried to adapt and modify a “hamburger”, (actually, of course, a beef-burger), to sell in India, it would never be accepted unless the product was specifically known as not containing any meat from a cow.  So, for the Indian market, McDonald’s core product, the beef-burger, remains strictly off the menu.  Instead McDonald’s have changed and expanded the products which use chicken or fish to make-up their core product on the subcontinent.

I’m sure that you can appreciate the flaw in the widely accepted “glocal” strategy: that there is a one-way traffic in ideas, (with just local modifications), taking place from West to East.  This blinkered type of thinking means that otherwise bright executives miss lots of business opportunities.  The West has a great deal to learn from the East and needs to be adaptable so that the movement in ideas, products and services is two-way.  As an example of the differences between West and East, I’ve extracted the data on the above chart from some global research, called The Visual Life Study, undertaken by Intel.   An overview of the report was released early in January this year.  This study was used as the basis for the international “Visual Life” advertising campaign, used to promote Intel’s current crop of 2^nd Generation Core processors.  I’ve taken a subset of the data that was a response to the simple question: “Where do you view movies?”

Movies and Sport are staples of the international TV diet, so asking where people view movies reveals a lot about today’s TV viewing behaviour and media consumption generally.  In many ways the behaviour of the so-called “emerging economies” of Asia already point to the media activities that many Western consumers will increasingly come to adopt in the future.  According to the Intel research, 65% of Chinese consumers already view their movies on a computer, as do 34% of people in South Korea and 27% in India.  Compare these figures for those in the Western economies: just 7% of people in the United States, and 8% in Germany, view their movies online.  In terms of marketing communication in Asia, these figures contain a clear message: don’t overestimate the power of TV advertising to promote awareness among potential customers.

In Asian countries, the computer, often plugged into a large LCD screen, is usually the focus of attention in the living room, frequently taking the place that Western consumers reserve for the television set.  And more movies are viewed individually on a laptop, or with just one other person sharing the smaller screen.  Also the young Chinese have a love of technology and are quickly adapting to online movie viewing from their TV sets, scroll to the bottom of this page and watch the video.  In the West, the TV in the sitting room is the primary place on which movies are watched: 75% in the United States and 76% in Germany.  And this is why, in the USA and Europe, advertising on TV is still the most popular method of creating brand awareness and, as the audience is relatively large, it is also by far the most expensive.  In Asia the comparative figures are: 36% in India; 22% in South Korea; and 20% in China.  As watching movies on TV in Asia is not the dominant consumer behaviour, advertising on TV just doesn’t have the audience reach (the necessary percentage of total population) or, of course, the effectiveness that TV has in Western economies.

A similar disparity in marketing communication between the West and East is shown by the difference in consumer behaviour regarding the importance of actually going to the cinema to watch a movie.  A mere 10% of the population in the United States and Germany watch movies at the cinema, and these audiences are primarily younger people.  By comparison, people of all ages regularly go to the cinema to enjoy movies in South Korea (37% of movie consumption) and in India (28%).  So in these countries advertising in the cinema is an excellent, as well as a low-cost, method of raising awareness about a product or service.  But be careful, not all Asian countries are the same.  In China only 7% of people watch movies in a cinema, even fewer than those in the United States or Germany.  So if you plan to market anything in China, being aware of this type of interesting variance in behaviour provides invaluable insights.  In a fast-moving global market going “glocal” with a product or service may be highly appropriate, or a disaster, but an unbiased and thoughtful analysis of all available data, like Intel’s, should help to keep you in the picture.

The chart above uses data from Statcounter to show the share of the Internet browser market in Europe.  Statcounter tracking code is installed on over three million websites located around the world.  These websites receive in excess of 195 billion “hits” or server requests from Internet browsers in the course of a year and provide one of the best public sources of reliable information about Internet browser market share.  Europe is generally a good early indicator of changes in Internet browser use – way ahead of the United States.  One reason for this is that in March 2010 Microsoft was forced to comply with a European Union (EU) ruling to offer EU residents a choice of Internet browsers, rather than the default setting of installing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.  This action was finally imposed on Microsoft in December 2009 at the end of a bitter, long-running anti-trust dispute.  You can read about this here or view the browser choice screen that Europeans see here.

What the data over the last three years clearly shows is the dramatic and consistent rise in the use of Google’s Chrome browser.  This has been primarily achieved at the expense of all versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which have shown a steady decline except for a recent pick-up when Internet Explorer 9 was launched.  My take on this is that it indicates that Internet users value browsing speed above everything else.  And Google plays on this, as you can see on their section of the EU Browser Choice screen shown on the chart.  Google’s browser, especially version 10, has been highly rated for speed; you can see the speed difference on a chart here.  Microsoft’s Internet Explorer version 8 has cost it a lot of market share because of its poor performance and speed. As the chart demonstrates, the recent pick-up in Internet Explorer use is due to Explorer 9’s much improved speed increase.  In fact tests show that Internet Explorer 9 probably has the fastest performance of any browser now, watch this video and be impressed.  Of course, not all of the increased popularity of Chrome is down to its speed in displaying web pages, some if it’s down to slick marketing.  It’s ironic that Google makes 96% of its income from advertising (see page 13 of the pdf of the 2010 full year Accounts) but it actually grew to be a behemoth in just over seven years without ever spending anything on advertising.  It’s only during the 30 months, (since its launch of the Chrome browser in December 2008), that Google has started to advertise in Europe.  Clearly this has partly been to take advantage of the EU Browser Choice screen.  Google’s advertising media spend has primarily majored on outdoor posters with the occasional promotion in newspapers, for an example see this article.  This marketing expense is unlikely to decrease as Google continues to face up to Microsoft.

Did you know that Google is developing a unified operating system across mobile phones, laptops and desk top computers that will integrate into their “cloud services”?  The first step to this is oddly code-named “ice cream sandwich,” and it’s due out at the end of this year, you can find out more by reading this article.  Meanwhile, Microsoft’s next step towards a unified operating system is known as Mango. You can see what they’re up to by watching this video here.

With all this in mind, you can appreciate how strategically imperative it is for Google and Microsoft to achieve a dominant browser market share and why the two companies will be anxiously focussing on their browser market share like in the chart shown above.

But Facebook has a successful history of overriding their users’ preferences, specifically with regards to privacy.  On the Internet a year is a long time and by June 2011, on an average day on the website in the United States, to “Like” another person’s content was the most common activity (26%). This is ahead of commenting on somebody else’s post or status (22%) or responding to another person’s photo (20%).  These figures come from the recently released report titled: “Social Networking and our lives” published by the Pew Internet Project.  (It’s worth noting that the Pew survey used a smaller sample of Facebook users, only 877 people, on which to base their findings, some 3,637 fewer than Mashable’s.)

The Pew report also shows that of the Americans who use an online social network, Facebook is by far the most popular with 92% of users, compared with My Space (29%), Linked In (18%) and Twitter (13%).

To create this chart I’ve drilled down into the data to expose the most popular activity on the most popular online social network in the US.  Displaying the data in visual form, rather than the table form used in the Pew report, makes it easier to distinguish the difference that age makes to behaviour.  Just looking at the yellow line indicating the average frequency of clicking a “Like” button doesn’t show the extremes, or “outliers”, of the behaviour.  For example, compare the 30% of the 18-22 year olds who click on a “Like” button several times a day with the average of half that number among all the age groups.  Or, at the other end of the age groupings, look at the 35% of people aged over 65 who never click on a “Like” button compared to the 12% of the youngsters aged 18-22.  Averages always hide the wide variation in distribution across groupings.

Facebook was commercially driven to make the change to soften the “Become a Fan” button, as they explained in a confidential email sent to advertising agencies. Tests had shown that apparently twice the number of people would click a button labelled “Like” than would click “Become a Fan” and Facebook had to increase the button usage.  Higher numbers of consumers clicking and approving Brands was obviously very desirable for Facebook.  Now one of the key social media metrics that Brands monitor is the number of “Likes” they receive, and perhaps this goes some way to justify the marketing expenditure made with Facebook.  But for Brands and consumers alike this crude metric demonstrates the binary and simple nature of the measurements of much of social networking behaviour.

On Facebook there is no way to display subtlety or grades of expression – you either “Like” something or not. There are no shades of difference or degree.  This clumsy restriction of human expression will have to change if Facebook is to arrest the declining numbers of visitors in developed countries.  It should not underestimate the importance of the future threat of Apple’s rumoured social network.  Apple has an installed base of over 108 million iPhones worldwide (Apple figures as at March 2011), more than enough for an effective network.  Furthermore Apple has been developing a social network to rival Facebook for some years and has been expanding on its existing patents in this area.  Click here for an explanation of the latest Apple patent that has just surfaced after being originally filed in 2009.

Apple, with their legendary design and human interaction skills, can dramatically improve the consumers’ social networking experience.  Could the same thing that happened to Nokia in the mobile phone space be about to happen to Facebook?  Nokia thought that they were in an unassailable position just as Facebook thinks they are today.  In any event, tighter integration of the iPhone hardware will emerge in the autumn in Apple’s new operating system iOS 5.  And that will be the platform on which many consumers will be enthusiastically clicking the “Like” buttons on their iPhones and iPads.

As little as 10 years ago we only interacted intimately on a daily basis with our families and close friends, an average of five people. These are known as “strong ties”. Our wider social circle included more distant family and friends, an average of 11 people, with whom we probably engaged on a weekly or monthly basis. By engaged, I mean that we actually met them and spent time with them. These people were very important to us, and the interaction we had with them was vital for our emotional well-being.  And because we had to invest considerable time and effort in maintaining all these relationships, we were highly selective in choosing our close friends.  Of course we also had more formal and peripheral interactions with acquaintances, neighbours and work associates, but moving house, or changing jobs, meant that we frequently lost contact with these people.

Nowadays, it is interesting and curious to note that using social networking websites to keep in touch with work associates and acquaintances has become habitual, (particularly among the younger age groups) and these hitherto peripheral relationships now make up the majority of our online social contacts.  Sadly, for many people, they may also make up the majority of social contacts by default.  These types of contacts are what computer networking theory calls our “weak ties.”  It is being able to monitor and communicate with these weak ties that make a website like LinkedIn useful and this perceived usefulness is what drove LinkedIn’s initial public offering (IPO) share price at the end of May.  Set for sale initially at $45 per share, the price quickly rose to $122 per share on the first day of public trading.  This result bodes well for the largest social network of them all, Facebook, which seems on target to sell its shares to the public sometime next year.

It’s up to psychologists and sociologists to determine the emotional impact that maintaining numerous online relationships are having on our strong ties, but something has to give when online social networking takes so much time out of our lives.  How much time? Let’s see: For this chart I’m using comScore’s Media Metrix European data.  This measured the online social network behaviour that took place during the socially festive month of December 2010.  Facebook statistics claim that their 500 million active users spend 700 billion minutes on Facebook per month, but all data should be examined critically and I was suspicious about their numbers.  Calculating these figures means that the average visitor uses Facebook for 23 hours per month.  That seemed very high to me so I went to DoubleClick Ad Planner to investigate Google’s network traffic figures for Facebook.  DoubleClick Ad Planner combines aggregated Google Analytics data and publisher opt-in data as well as consumer panel data.  As this data is used by the advertising industry to buy display advertising it represents the best form of measurement currently publicly available.  Looking at their UK data for Facebook, DoubleClick reports an average visit time per cookie of 25 minutes, and an average number of 14 visits made during the month.  That equates to a little less than six hours in total for a month.  Quite a difference when compared with Facebook’s claim of 23 hours per visitor per month.

They can’t both be right.  It has been comScore’s argument for a long time that using Web server data exaggerates the number of unique visitors because they rely on counting cookies not people.  When comScore measured this effect in the UK back in March 2009 they came to the conclusion that cookie deletion overstated a website’s measured traffic by 140 per cent.  Further studies around the world seemed to confirm this margin of error.  But even allowing for this level of error Facebook’s average of 23 hours per user per month compared with DoubleClick’s 6 hours still looks extraordinary.  This is a problem I frequently encounter looking at Web analytics data and it is well worth running a sense check against another measurement system.

In this chart I’m using comScore figures that are derived from consumer panel data.  Besides examining all data critically it’s always important to understand how the data has been captured.  For example, in the UK comScore has a panel consisting of a representative sample of 60,000 consumers who have opted-in to allow their Web behaviour to be tracked.  This data shows that on average just over six hours a month is spent engaging with social networking websites.  This equates quite closely with the DoubleClick data which isn’t surprising as one of the elements that make up their data comes from a consumer panel, although they won’t say which one.  However I have a suspicion that this is comScore data.

As comScore’s data collection methodology is consistent across Europe it provides a useful picture of the relative differences in behaviour of the different age groups in each country.  One salient feature of this dataset is how much time, nearly 11 hours a month, that young people in Spain are spending on social network websites compared to older age groups.  Perhaps this difference in time spent on social networks is related to Spain’s very high (estimated at 45%) youth unemployment.  If one is not busy working, then one certainly has more time, but not the money, to be social. And, of course, Facebook is free.

This chart also shows the amount of time people across all age groups in the UK spend on social networking websites.  Apart from Spain’s 15 to 24 year age group which tops the chart, people of all ages in the UK spend significantly more time than other European countries on social websites.  Yet another feature to note is the consistent level of time spent visiting social network websites across the other European countries.  Only the UK and Spanish youth appear to exhibit higher use.  The chart also demonstrates that there is less disparity between the behaviour of the different age groups in Germany and the Netherlands than in other countries.

All this time spent visiting social network websites obviously comes at the cost of less time spent, or perhaps, no time spent, on real-life interaction with one’s strong ties.  Facebook claims that an average user has 130 Facebook friends, and apparently 50 percent of active users logon on any given day.  This adds to the stress, and increases the feeling of being time poor, as people try to maintain ever larger networks of “friends.” Then there’s tweeting and answering emails…

As our chart indicates: weak ties are becoming stronger at the expense of the strong ties. It’s a topsy-turvy world when the peripheral people in our lives start using up more of our precious time than our family and real friends…

The recent comScore data derived from European Internet behaviour shows that in the month of January this year an average UK online shopper spent 84.1 minutes visiting retail websites.  French online shoppers were just behind at 83.2 minutes.  It’s interesting to see that the British and French online shoppers spent considerably more time than the average European’s 52.4 minutes.  The Belgians came last, spending just under half an hour – 29.7 minutes – visiting retail websites.

What is remarkable, however, as the pie chart demonstrates, is that across Europe people spend the greatest amount of time online shopping for clothing.  The clothing sector, (often called apparel in the United States), has been a surprising e-commerce success.  In the early days of e-commerce online purchases were limited to low cost, and easily despatched, items like books, CDs and DVDs.  Clothing, and particularly fashion clothing, was considered to be an impossible product category to sell online primarily because of the perceived need to try-on garments or shoes before purchase.  How wrong this turned out to be.  In the UK in 2010, for example, eBay’s fashion revenues were 10% higher than any other area of its e-commerce sales.  As the data in the pie chart confirms, shoppers want to buy clothes online, particularly in Europe.

The e-commerce giant, Amazon, built its success on low cost staple products like books and CDs.  In fact, it started trading solely as a bookstore in 1995 and it wasn’t until 11 years later, in 2006, that it finally responded to the rapid growth of the online fashion sector by purchasing Shopbop.com.  In the last month (April 2011) the Shopbop website has undergone a major redesign, but unfortunately it still only offers free returns to customers in the United States and not to Europeans.  This is surprising as Amazon’s usually on the ball. It must know that it’s been the free returns policy that has been the key driver behind the exponential increase of online fashion purchases as it overcomes the inconvenience of not being able to try on a garment before buying it.  In fact free returns have been a major contributor to the rapid growth of popular online fashion retailers like asos.com.  It also clearly helps the online clothes sales of established high street stores like Monsoon.  Perhaps it’s only the supermarket clothing brands like George at ASDA (Wal*Mart), or stores like Marks & Spencer, which have less need to offer free delivery for returning unsatisfactory garments:  With a multiplicity of stores there is always somewhere within a comparatively short distance where the garment can be returned for a swap or a refund.  Typically, clothing return rates can run at 10%-30% of sales, so providing free returns is a major cost for online retailers but they clearly make enough profit to cover it. So until Amazon’s Shopbop starts offering free returns on clothes, I don’t expect it to be a great success in Europe.