What? New Media vs. Old Media Surprises

I just read about the Ketchum and USC Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center study on 2008 New Media vs. Old Media usage from an emarketer article and this Mashable! article. Obviously the articles focused on the rise of new media usage and the flattening out of old media usage. Two things that surprised me were the low low low numbers for RSS news feeds (only 7%) and the relatively high numbers for e-mail newsletters (42%, up 7% from last year). See the chart below from emarketer.

E-mail Newsletters vs. RSS Feeds

I was convinced the age of e-mail newsletters was slowly coming to an end, especially with the advent of RSS feeds. With an RSS feed you can pick and choose the content you want, read it when you want, display it however you want. It’s like grabbing the new relevant-to-you content from all your favorite sites without having to actually go to them. And with cool plugins like Feedly, you can create your own personalized magazine-like homepage with that custom content.

Why then, would anyone subscribe to an e-mail newsletter? The e-mail sits in my inbox waiting to be read, half of it’s not what I’m looking for anyway, and when enough email newsletters pile up I start clicking delete. My RSS feeds on the other hand sit patiently, out-of-veiw, waiting until I’m ready to come to them. Actually, in some circles rss feeds are already archaic, with people living on twitterscoop, twitter search and tweetdeck for their news.

These numbers make me feel kind of silly. I’ve been avoiding implementing an email newsletter solution because I thought it was on it’s way out. Shows what I know! I guess the important thing is what I do with this information. Constant Contact here I come.

Average Internet Usage

Also really surprising was the average number of hours per week users spend on the internet. Only 18 hours a week? At work, I’m on the internet all day. At home, my family watches all it’s movies and most T.V. shows online. Needless to say, my average weekly internet usage is way over 14 hours.

Why do you think they only included stats from people 18 and over? Does this number include mobile phone internet usage? Important questions to consider.

Conclusions

Just because I’m into social media, doesn’t mean everyone else is. Just because I spend hours on end on the internet, doesn’t mean the rest of the world is. Actually, according to these number, most of the world isn’t. Something to keep in mind when your making your pitch.

What do you think?