New US Stats for Online Activity

On December 15th, the US Census Bureau released some new statistics about online user activity; namely:

• That adults and teens will spend nearly five months (3,518 hours) next year watching television, surfing the Internet, reading daily newspapers and listening to personal music devices.
  
• Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online in 2005, 92 million purchased a product and 91 million made a travel reservation. About 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.
• There were 278 million debit cards in U.S. hands in 2004, with 22.2 billion transactions amounting to more than $1 trillion.
• Over $300 billion worth of consumer transactions were conducted online in 2005.
  

Pew and Associates have noted that there has been an over 500% increase in social networking in 2006 above the previous year. This means that over 80 million users are creating content through blogs, forums, or other social networking avenues - what's more, these social network websites are being used for research and purchasing. More so, all of these social avenues have an element of sponsored activity, be it through content ads, blog sponsorship, or leaderboards - what's more, there is an inherent ability to leap frog consumer touch points to shrink the consideration phase.

If you are not paying attention to social channels - you should be... $300 billion worth and growing...

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