I came across this interesting graph of Internet Traffic the other day. It comes from an article on the New York Times blog (now that is surprising to me!):

Internet Traffic Sources 1999 - 2005

The author, Nick Bilton, leads off his story by repeating some comments made by Chris Anderson, Wired magazine’s editor in chief. Anderson believes, “the Web is being crippled… [because]… a world of downloadable apps, which work through the Internet and arrive via gadgets like the iPhone or Xbox, are quickly cannibalizing the World Wide Web as consumers prefer buttoned-up, dedicated platforms, designed specifically for mobile screens.”

I don’t agree with this viewpoint, and I don’t think the observation is important anyway, as the average user of the Internet is probably unaware of the subtle differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web. But the graph’s story of the growth of traffic sources on the Internet is certainly worth a quick study.

The graph shows that Mr. Anderson’s prediction of the demise of the Internet, as Mark Twain would put it, is grossly exaggerated. The chart shows the picture from 1999 to 2005 and what grabbed my attention, was the growth of Video’s share of traffic. And we all know that since 2005, the growth in demand for video has increased significantly, so if we redrew this graph using today’s numbers, the percentage share of video traffic on the Internet would be much larger than even this depicts.

It goes without saying that video is a bandwidth hog, of course: As the numbers of us downloading or streaming video increases, the sheer volume of bits transmitted increases by orders of magnitude. But there can also be no doubt as to which is the preferred medium these days. We said this a little differently in a previous post, which talked about Landing Pages and how they should include Video.

The graph, however, does nothing to quantitatively support my claim for today’s net user’s preference for video. It could, for example, be a subgroup of users, like teenagers, accessing YouTube on an uninterrupted basis (like my daughter). And this subgroup could be a very small percentage of all web users. On the other hand, Google buying YouTube and the growth in the sheer number of videos being produced are clear indications of the growing importance of video. And in B2B applications, it’s uncommon to find a site with no video on it.

In essence, if you want your content to Engage your visitors, you had better ensure that some of it is Video. And over time, you should think of more ways to say what you want to say using video instead of text and still imagery.

Bit-by-Bit #34 from Eric.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.