Content Is King … Again (Or … Still?)
- Posted by Steve K. on August 15th, 2007 filed in Uncategorized
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Remember that saying, “Content is king”? Well, the folks at ChurchMarketingSucks.com (who I took a friendly jab at in my Lausanne World Pulse article), have picked up on a new study from OPA/Nielsen NetRatings about Web users’ online activities, and guess what? Content is king—again.
The study compares online activities in 2003 to today, and according to the research, the numbers have flip-flopped with 47% of people “reading content” and 33% of people doing “online communications” (compared to 34% and 46% four years ago). The CMS folks apply this data to church marketing and say, “We’ve beating a dead horse by continuing to harp on online video, but churches have to look at content beyond only video. Some people still want to engage by reading and not simply a flashy web site. Others want to foster discussion and give input to foster the growth of content.”
Interestingly, Ars Technica, who CMS cites in their post, interprets the data this way: “It seems that email’s popularity isn’t actually going down, but rather the availability of content to consume is going up.”
I think the reality is that more and more we are moving “offline” activities into the online world (thanks, in part, to social networking sites like Facebook), so we’re both interacting with content (text/visual) and using electronic communications. The fate of email specifically does seem to be a bit in question, especially if the results of a recent YPulse survey of youth media trends are any indication: “Less than 20% of the 13-17-year-olds surveyed profess to using email to communicate with friends, compared to 40% of adults ages 25-54.”
Inter-personal communication is great. Using new media tools (like Skype) to talk to people around the world is great. But the hunger and thirst for compelling stories (however they are told, via text or image) just seems to really be getting greater and greater. It’s a great time to be a communicator, as far as I’m concerned!
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