Warp speed media consumption – web vs TV

I love to read Jakob Nielsen’s alertbox news. Today, there was a cool side-by-side comparison of how quickly media is consumed on your “boob-tube” as my sixth grade science teacher Mrs. Nelson affectionately called it, versus the web. And mobile consumption is of course even faster. On the web, it’s all about instant-gratification according to Mr. Nielsen and I completely agree. It’s truly like a hunt for that holy grail and decisions are made in seconds, not minutes.

“The Web has powerful features, is nonlinear, and is user-driven — able to instantly gratifying users’ current needs based on their search engine queries. Mobile Web use lives even more in the current moment.

Compared to TV, the Web also has a much finer granularity of user control:

• When watching TV, you make one decision every 30–120 minutes: pick a show or movie to watch, and then it’s lean-back time. Ah, easy.
• When surfing the Web, you make a decision every 10–120 seconds: leave or stay on this page; leave or stay on this site. Where to click now? Where to click next? A bit stressful.

Adding up all these differences explains the fast pace of Web use: the velocity is much higher than we see for TV use.”  Full article here.

There’s even studies on the effectiveness of surfing the web WHILE watching TV. I’ll find some and post soon. I have to admit that I’d count myself in that population of web surfing TV watchers. If you’re like me, a big tech geek and self-employed, I’m often sitting on the couch in the evening during the week clicking away on my laptop watching the news or my favorite shows. Even movies. I find it comical how my husband and I will often debate over factual content in a movie, especially one that is ‘based on a true story” and then immediately bust out the laptop to Google a factoid or look up a certain historical figure.

Just goes to show, things are moving a light speed and ways to influence your audience are multiplying exponentially. Your brand is now not just about the number of impressions you can put out there with various media channels, but the entire user experience.  Every second counts in how a visitor will come to you site or stumble over your content and this is why it’s more important than ever to understand your audience and thoughtfully create that new website. How will your business keep up?