Back when I chose my university study subjects, the combination of Media & Communications, Criminology and Computing seemed somewhat disconnected to many. With the joy of hindsight, I’m sure now that most can see the intrinsic connections between, say, the first two and much of what has been reported out of Lord Leveson’s epic enquiry, and how the first and the last make up much of today’s media landscape.
Ofcom has recently published it’s annual report into the Communications market in the UK and it further underlines for me how lucky I was to get an academic grounding in both media and information technology (the criminology bit occasionally comes in use…)
Highlights from the report seem to underline how personal information technology is changing our behaviours in many realms:
- For the first time, advertising spend was greater in 2011 in digital (£4.8bn) than in any other category, including TV (£4.2bn) or press (£3.9bn). £2.8bn of that figure was search advertising, which represents a significant shift of ad revenue away from the traditional media providers.
- Retail sales transacted online amounted to £2.6bn in February 2012, growing from £2bn in 2011 but still only amounting to 11% of total retail sales in the UK that month.
- However, ecommerce has grown at ten times the rate of retail sales in the high street in the past three years.
- More telephone call minutes were consumed on mobile than on fixed line phones for the first time ever, but both categories dropped.
- More than 40% of smartphone users (which in turn now is 39% of the population) regard their phone as the most important device for accessing the Internet.
- Tablet ownership in the UK has risen from 2% of households to 11% between Q1 2011 and Q1 2012. Most people buy them for entertainment, and see them as a luxury purchase.
The whole thing is massive, but I’m going to try to plough through it in the next few days and see what other nuggets of “fact” strike me as important…
mmitII 