Predicting Trends on the Internet

Interesting story on Reuters about how the search requests on the Internet are changing. This quote in particular stood out to me.

Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

"As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased," said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

"My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites."

I'm a fan of the technologies that we see coming up on websites now. The ability for the web to adjust and get instant feedback from its users via comments and other user generated content is a powerful tool. However, sometimes I think we as people in the industry get a little excited about what we think we know.

Take a look at this report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project (2005). Some of its key findings...

A wide-ranging look at the way American women and men use the internet shows that men continue to pursue many internet activities more intensively than women, and that men are still first out of the blocks in trying the latest technologies.

At the same time, there are trends showing that women are catching up in overall use and are framing their online experience with a greater emphasis on deepening connections with people.

I'm wondering if the rise of social media is perhaps a result of the fact that more women are on the Internet (as a percentage) then ever before, and their interests on-line closely align with the types of activities that social networking promotes.

I still think that connecting your employees, listening to your customers, and letting your suppliers have even better insight into how you are marketing your products is a good thing. But it's a dangerous thing to hitch your wagon to the next great wave on the Internet. If your website already is content rich, now is a fantastic time to start weaving in social media to your website. However if you know your user comments are going to mostly be "Your website sucks!" and "Why can't I find this product on your website?" then that is where you need to focus.

User generated content sounds fantastic, because from far enough way, it sounds like you get content without having to spend the time and resources to generate it yourself. But committing to social media tools on your website means that you will end up spending more time and effort on your website than ever before. Because now you have to react at light speed to the corrections, comments, and outright complaints that your users will generate.

What do you do if you are determined to connect via social networks now to your customers? Hey, that's a good thing, and you can do it even if your website isn't ready. I'll talk about that in a later blog post.