Morning:
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A week rarely passes without someone in the media boasting about some enormous boost in their internet usage. I have said it myself. But I'm beginning to wonder if the claims come anywhere near the reality.
The oddity is that though we all leave massive trails once we go surfing on the worldwide web, the information that can be gleaned from them is not quite as revealing as we might think.
They may betray all sorts of things about an individual's habits and peculiar interests. That may well be interesting to companies trading on the net and, in certain controversial instances, it may prove important to enable the authorities to monitor them.
Getting a fix on a collective of individuals - on the online activities of a nation, for example - is infinitely more difficult. To do so inevitably involves taking samples and, despite the best efforts of researchers, it is tending to throw up statistics that are, to be frank, very slippery.
Take the latest set of figures designed to show how many people are reading national newspaper websites. The Audit Bureau of Circulations, whose electronic arm is known as ABCe, takes enormous care with its research.
But it has run into trouble because it reported that the Telegraph has recorded more individual users to its website than any other title. The Telegraph has also enjoyed a dramatic increase in overall traffic. This turn of events has raised eyebrows among rivals who are now seeking some kind of explanation.
Telegraph.co.uk is credited with 18,646,112 unique users during the month of April, a 9.5% increase over March and an eye-popping year-on-year rise of 153.4%. Guardian.co.uk, the digital leader for several years, stood at 18,546,017.
Mail Online, which I had expected to emerge as the frontrunner, was said to have 18,039,943 uniques.
There are diverting differences within those totals, such as the UK users versus the foreign users or the number of page views versus the number of users, and so on.
But it is also clear that the ABC audit is subject to wide disparities because, within each paper's overall website, are sub-sites, some of which account for huge traffic that may distort the headline total. I am not blaming ABC. It is, after all, a creature of the industry and it is in the best interests of all involved, the newspaper publishers and the media buyers who base advertising spend on the figures, to get as clear a picture as possible of the truth.
I also understand that the committee responsible for overseeing the audit is considering a new comparison by measuring the time people spend on each site.
Running in parallel is a debate about the techniques and tools employed to boost figures. Is it simply a matter of one paper using sophisticated measurement software others have not obtained? It is further evidence that, in the foothills of this digital revolution, a certain Wild West climate is inevitable, so the sheriff is finding it hard to impose discipline.
At least we can applaud the rigour of ABC's audit surveys. I am much less convinced by some of the findings of BT's 21st Century Life Index Report, which examined the digital world as it stands now compared with the visions of the public 10 years ago. (NB: "visions" are not facts). According to the report, conducted in association with Ipsos MORI, 57% of Britons spend at least five hours online each week. Two major reasons for the increasing levels of internet use are shopping and banking.
It predicts that 41% of the British public will shop online this year, up from just 2% a decade ago. I was willing to swallow what appeared to be a somewhat optimistic forecast until I read on to discover that text messaging could become a dead technology within the next few years.
How clever of BT to discover that consumers will soon prefer a converged communication tool that can send emails, instant messages, make phone calls and access the web from anywhere and thereby render texting obsolete. And, by the way, doesn't this "communication tool" already exist?
I also read from another survey - conducted by Juniper Research, the British-based telecoms analysis firm - which predicts that the global market for mobile advertising will pass the $1 billion mark for the first time this year and will reach $7.6 billion by 2013. The market will comprise a number of different forms of advertising, including SMS, MMS, in-content download advertising, on-portal advertising, mobile internet advertising, idle screen advertising, and mobile TV and video advertising.
Despite the BT survey claims about text messaging obsolescence, Juniper's report claims that SMS advertising - which already has the largest proportion of the mobile market, worth around $335 million in 2008 - is expected to rise to $2.5 billion by 2013.
Meanwhile, amid all this heady speculation about electronic media, comes a report from the Newspaper Marketing Agency, that reveals a surprising turnaround in the advertising fortunes of national papers. It shows that their share of the UK display advertising market grew for the second year running in 2007.
Display advertising in the newsprint editions of national titles rose to 14% in 2007, up just a little on 2006. And that report is based on fact, on hard figures, not on a thumb-sucking survey of "visions".
