All About Content

Let’s catch up on news from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. According to their latest studies, home broadband adoption has become mainstream:

• Internet penetration has now reached 73% for all American adults. At the end of March 2006, 42% of Americans had high-speed at home, 40% increase over last year.
• About 60 million Americans say that the Internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years (what votes to cast for American Idol, for example)¹
• By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002 (which is also the year American Idol premiered). For a group of “high-powered” online users — early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest Internet users — the Internet is their primary news source on the average day.
• And 48 million Americans — mostly those with high-speed at home — have posted content to the Internet.
• Overall, 35% of all Internet users have posted one or more of four types of content to the Internet: having one’s own blog; having one’s own webpage; working on a blog or webpage for work or a group; or sharing self-created content such as a story, artwork, or video.²
• An even higher percentage of home broadband users — 42% or about 31 million people — have posted content to the Internet. They account for 73% of home Internet users who were the source of online content.
• Sharing a variety of creations online is among the most popular kinds of user-generated content. Overall, 36 million Internet users have shared their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos on the internet. That comes to 26% of Internet users. Home broadband users account for about two-thirds of this number.

fn1. When I first published this post, I had accidentally deleted this bullet point — which made the paranthetical in the third bullet very strange indeed. Now that I’ve added it back in, it should all make sense again. Relatively.

fn2. And let’s not forget profiles on online dating sites. According to Pew: “Some 11% of all Internet users and 37% of those who are single and looking say they have gone to dating websites.”