The Ofcom Communications Market Report makes fascinating reading - though at 334 pages it ought to include something of interest, eh?
News that 15-24 year olds are deserting Facebook and MySpace as the sites are taken over by parents amused me. The proportion with a profile on a social networking site has fallen from 55% to 50% in the past year, while the proportion of adults aged 25-34 has risen from 40% to 46%.
At the same time Facebook and MySpace remain immensely popular with children under 16, apparently. It's a chance to escape your parents' world while in the parental home, I guess.
Blow me, it's those 25-34 year olds behind the explosion in Twitter, too, at least according to The Guardian's report - I haven't got far enough through the damn report yet myself. This fits the recent Morgan Stanley report that concluded Twitter is not for teens (authored by a 15-year-old). My bet is if you removed the marketers from Twitter it would substantially moderate the volume of tweets, but that is another story.
Clearly the internet plays an ever greater role in our lives. However, Ofcom's findings do not entirely fit the "online sweeps all before it" view reflected in the media.
For example, Britons spent an average of 225 minutes a day watching TV last year - longer than in 2003 by one minute. That is nine times the average spent online (25 minutes) and 20 times what we spent on our mobiles (11 minutes).
So we spend vastly more time watching TV than on any and all new media combined. This more than anything is what lies behind the switch to digital TV.
In fact, we still spend more time on landline phones (13 minutes a day) than on mobiles.
No doubt that will switch at some point soon, but other trends may take longer to fulfil new-media fantasies. Most unauthorised music sharing is done by copying CDs not sharing downloaded files, for example. And more than two-thirds of