Sunday, September 09, 2012

Teens flock to Instagram/Facebook. Youtube next?

(Sept. 8, 2012. CNet) According to Nielsen, Instagram is the top photography site among teens ages 12 to 17, with 1 million teens visiting the site during July.
Also, a Pew report presented over the summer about teenage online behavior found that 45 percent of online 12-year-olds use social-network sites and that the number doubles to 82 percent for 13-year-old Internet users. The most popular activity for teens on social networks is posting photos and videos, the study found.
10 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that mothers of small children were the most avid picture-takers.  Kodak, HP, and others spent billions of dollars marketing to this demographic. Furthermore, when digital cameras emerged, the old guard saw an increase in picture printing revenues because people took more pictures and, out of habit, printed them. The entire business model was based on the trade-off: the more pictures one wanted to share, the more money she had to spend on printing them.

On the other hand, social networking and cheap mobile cameras broke the trade-off. That is, taking/sharing pictures became free and teenagers could finally afford an infinite amount of sharing. As the result, Kodak went out of business and HP's printing division tanked. At the same time, Facebook and Instagram soared.

A similar situation happened in the personal video space. Sony and other consumer electronic companies lost, while Youtube and Facebook won. If Google continues its momentum with Android (driving video content to Youtube), they might capture a large portion of ad revenue associated with social interaction.

tags: s-curve, trade-off, media, facebook, social, networking, google

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