Thread by @robblackie_oo

Ofcom’s Online Nation, out yesterday, is as useful as their other major reports.

Interesting findings include:

1.Even the over 75s are now mainly online. Only 13% of adults are offline now.

2. As many 3-4 year olds go online as 75+ year olds (52%)

3.There are still plenty of people who have only recently got online. So, for instance, 26% of people who are online don’t use email, 27% don’t browse.

4. Ecommerce still has a long way to go. Only 46% of internet users buy online.

5.Use of government services online lags – only 19% regularly do this. Likely a reflection of poor services until recently.

6.Smartphones are 68% of online time. Yet poorly mobile optimised experiences are still common.

7. Google & Facebook networks account for 35% of time online. YouTube alone accounts for 27 minutes a day & Spotify 23 minutes – over double two years ago.

8.This is despite Facebook being the least trusted of the major tech companies. Google is well trusted, but YouTube is significantly less so, ironically.

9.Non-Google search includes Wikipedia links (30% of people), social apps (40%), review sites (37%) and the BBC website (30%). If Facebook ever get better search, it’s potentially huge.

minor. More of a concern for Facebook is that it’s now sharing attention with other channels – the proportion of people only using Facebook has fallen from 43% to 20%.

11.People spend 23 minutes a day on Facebook vs 9 minutes on Snapchat. Only Facebook and YouTube hold a lot of people for a long time. Snapchat’s erosion of Facebook/Instagram among teens has levelled off.

12.LinkedIn continues to be the network everybody underestimates. People spend 53 minutes a month on average on LinkedIn. Tiny compared to Facebook but with limited competition.

13. YouTube is potentially huge for B2B. The second biggest category of videos are ‘how to’ which includes everything from cosmetics to coding.

14. Much more time is spent in apps than on web. One implication is that most customer journeys probably start on apps. So handovers between app and web matter a lot.

15. Smart TVs are on the rise far more than wearables. A challenge here is optimising for mobile web and smart TV simultaneously.

16. The BBC continues to be an online giant. Arguably in 2019 the BBC has more influence than in 1999 – as newspapers have declined.

17. Twitter’s reach is a surprisingly high 59% of the population. I can only assume this means a lot of logged out users (ie without an account, who see it embedded etc).

18.48% of children are breaking the rules and joining social networks while under 13.

For more discussion see my recent article on this:
linkedin.com/pulse/facebook…

19. Netflix is neck and neck with iPlayer for subscription video. No ads on either.

20.Half the population have a Gmail account. Are your emails optimised for Gmail?

21. Mobile games are the, almost, £1bn industry that barely gets mentioned.

22.Less than 20% of online revenues are from advertising. Transactional sites are vastly bigger, and subscriptions are catching up fast. I’d assume there’s much more room for growth in non-advertising too.

23.Facebook asks for a lot more data than other major apps.

Smart speakers don’t dominate for any purpose [It’s the yellow sliver if you are struggling to find it in these graphs!]. I’ve written more on this here:
thedrum.com/opinion/2019/0…

Thanks to @ofcom for publishing this. And as usual publishing other useful accompanying data.

Full report here: ofcom.org.uk/research-and-d…