Technology Surveys of Interest May 30, 2009

There were several technology usage surveys presented at the Wall Street Journal All Things Digital Conference (D7) this past week.  I took some screen snapshots that seem to be reasonably legible so I am posting links to those images here.

The first image explores how the folks that run Twitter might consider making money someday.  Monetizing Twitter is the title of the slide.  Things like banner adds, professional accounts, and text advertising are compared across different demographic populations.

This next image explores the iPhone relationship with the AT&T service provider.  The title of this survey slide is iPhone Disincentives and it asks the question “What is the reason that you don’t own or use an iPhone?”  This question stimulated some interesting conversation with the CEO of AT&T during the conference session.

This next survey slide shows how things are going in the social network space (relative to participation). Social Network Participation is surveyed across different demographic groups and across the different social network services.  Twitter, MySpace and Facebook show some interesting results.  Take a look.

I found this next survey quite interesting.  The qustion (that many seem to have opinions about) is: “If you were using MySpace more in the past, why are you using it less today?”  So take a look at this slide: Using MySpace Less

So how are the search engines focused on consumer needs stacking up against each other?  We could reasonably assume that Google has the dominate market position.  But by how much?  And how are the other guys doing?  Search By The Numbers shows how the different public-facing search engines are doing against each other.  Google has 54% of the take with Yahoo with 22% of the search engine usage.  How about the other guys?  Take a look here to see How Consumers Choose Their Search Engine

So you think you want to buy a “netbook” computer?  Well you may be in a small minority if that is your preference.  The following survey “Consumers Not Sold on Netbooks” tells a different story from what we see the manufacturing and distfribution gearing up for in the stores these days.

So with all this online content being generated outside the newspaper industry, how popular is Newspaper Content Online these days? It turns out to be quite popular and it seems to give emphasis to consumer demand for authoritative content. However the vast majority of Americans do not pay to subscribe to online content.  That seems to pose an interesting problem for the traditional newspaper companies.  How do they plan to make money on their “stuff?”  The good news here for the newspapers is that paying for content is not out of the question for those surveyed (even though most do not yet pay today).  Some Americans will clearly pay for news that they can use.  These authoritative sources just need to package news up for better consumption.  But just in case I or anybody else might have grand ideas about creating a subscription account for a blog, we may wish to consider that the vast majority will not pay for access to blogs.  That seems to have emerged as a defined “free zone” for information distribution.