Viva la User Revolution

It’s official: Communitainment is almost a real word

The Internet is now a mainstream medium, according to research company Piper Jaffray & Co., which recently released a comprehensive report under the catchy title, “The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium.”

It doesn’t surprise me, because just a few years ago, the Internet was perceived as the medium of the moment. Now it’s the medium of record.

The study also found that the Internet is the leading medium at work and second at home, just behind TV. Internet reach continues to grow exponentially while the cost of both advertising and publishing decreases, making it more accessible to even the most casual entrepreneur. And with mobile and emerging platforms on the rise, greater reach is possible.

And that’s good news for you, dear Yahoo! Search Marketing advertiser. Instead of looking for customers—which is what advertisers and publishers of the past had to do—now they come and find you.

Search is the second most commonly used application on the Web, with nearly 600 million searches daily. Today, search marketing is a $15.8 billion annual global industry, and it is expected to grow to $44.5 billion annually in the next five years.

With our new advertising system, which you may know by its code name, “Project Panama,” we’re empowering our advertisers with greater control of their campaigns. That means more control over campaign budgeting, scheduling and geo-targeting, which could translate to a greater slice of that very large pie noted above.

Communitainment?
The report, a whopping 425-pager (I read most of it—honestly), has also come up with an enchanting new buzzword: communitainment.

The Internet, says the report, has become a principal medium for community, communication and entertainment. This new activity, communitainment, is taking time away from other, more traditional types of content consumption on the Internet. Piper Jaffray names Yahoo! Answers as an example of communitainment.

Search, therefore, becomes one of the leading actions for communitainment. The analysis found that there are more than 550 million searches performed daily on the Web from all over the world, and that—get this—35 percent of all Internet searches are commercial in nature.

The success of search marketing follows a very commonsensical observation: Customers tend to act on an offer when they are actively looking for a product or service.

Consumers are now in Control
“The historically passive consumer is changing rapidly, not only becoming more informed and confident about purchase decisions, but also increasingly taking control of the consumption of information and content that used to be distributed by networks, studios, publishers and retailers,” says Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. “We believe this will cause a significant rise in prominence of the Internet as a major content consumption and marketing medium.”

In fact, the Piper Jaffray report placed Yahoo! as one of the top companies to watch in this arena: “The company is at the crossroads of changing its structure and embracing the User Revolution.”

Thanks for the kind mention, Piper Jaffray. But it’s our users who are the ones leading the charge. And as the new media landscape continues to develop, we’ll be working with you to be a part of it.

—Roger Park, Head Trend-spotter