Digital takeover

There have been three pieces of information that have particularly caught my eye in the past few weeks (above all of the Olympic hullabaloo, anyway):

In 2011, for the first time, Ofcom recorded that Digital advertising formed the biggest single category of advertising in the UK (£4.8bn), bigger than TV (£4.2bn), Press (£3.9bn) or any other channel.

The Financial Times now has a greater number of digital subscribers than its daily print circulation.

Amazon reveal that they now sell more eBooks than printed editions through their UK site.

Out of interest, I tried to find out from the BPI (British Phonographic Institute – the UK music industry trade body) where music sales are at. The most recent figures come from the distant past – or 2009. Three years ago, it seems, digital downloads made up the vast proportion of total single sales (149.7m digital versus 3.1m physical format singles sold) versus album sales where digital amounted to 16.1m versus 112.9m albums sold on physical format. But the headlines are misleading, because the behaviours of purchasing seem to be significantly changing with album sales steadily falling from 2005 onwards, whilst “single” (or, more likely, single track) purchasing increasing by double-digit percentages every year in the same period.

What this shows for me is not only that we are seeing significant shifts to digital formats across the media and advertising, but that also digital will often show changes in consumption patterns: single tracks rather than whole albums in music (and who knows the impact subscription services like Spotify have had); and search over space in advertising (search made up £2.8bn of the total £4.8bn). I know that my own consumption of books has changed in the advent of Kindle (there’s more unread stuff on my virtual bookshelf than I would ever have had on my physical ones), and similarly I know that my consumption of news media is significantly different now that I myself rarely if ever buy a paper newspaper.

It’s an incredibly shifting world that we find in the media sector today. Digital distribution isn’t just a change in the method of content delivery – it also significantly changes the way in which the content is consumed and shared. It doesn’t look like we are going to see any let-up in this change any time soon…