Welcome to… Googledom, Socialistan, Newscorpey and Disturbia

Socialistan is the largest country in the new world accounting for 31 % of total time-spend. Here by far the most Danes are actively engaged in updating their facebook-status, twitting and blogging. The women of Socialistan leads on, while men are more passive.

You won’t find a Dane who hasn’t spend time in Googledom within the past month. For 24 % of their online-time  they’re googling around, looking up numbers and facts and using the tools of the Internet.

Especially men are fond of Newscorpey. They like to stay informed (though top issues evolves around sex, gossip and crime stories). The country is ruled by the “old media” who find a hard time in the fact they’re not the key media providers anymore, accounting only for 15 % of the time Danes spend on the Internet.

In Disturbia you’re engaged in buying and selling. Danes loves this – however there’s nowhere enough online outlets to satisfy their needs: one third of all Disturbia-activity is spend second-hand shopping, consumer to consumer.

The mobile moon is orbiting around our new globe – especially powered by the iphon-ish way the internet are spreading to the pockets of Danes.

(Time spend for the four countries all are Gemius-figures for +15 years olds surfing (top 300 sites) in August 2009, which I’ve digged for you (I also analyzed them and drew up the above map). Socialistan activity is documented in Facebook rules Danish social networking, in Danish facts: Twitter is a small, elitist niche-site and in arto.com vs facebook. If you want to know more about the gender issues, check out War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information. For documentation of Newscopey-characteristics, see Economics of news: the case for qualitative journalism on the internet. Disturbia-facts and -explanations are found in Eroding powers of digitalization revealed: Secondhand-shopping, telecommunications and e-banking rules e-commerce in Denmark and Oldschool/Newschool: Top 25 Danish e-commerce sites evaluated – Consumer-trust and exploitation of business opportunities. For more on the Mobile moon check “Christmas sales at Apple App-store. Assessing the Danish market for iPhone applications”, Smart-phones leading the way: The case of iPhone and dedicated mobil-sites in Denmark and The seven faces of iPad. Assessing the potentials of Apples new tablet-device. Several other findings are available from my hand; check out the reports-section of this site)

With $188 worth in ad revenues, how much journalism can you afford to put into the average online article?

This is to me the most important questions, my new analysis raises: We as a society needs someone who on an ongoing basis scans the radar for poor functioning, mal-conduct and fraud in government and business, and sees to it that matters are digged into, holding those in charge responsible.

The bloggers, the Google-news and Digg aggregators or the Wikileaks won’t be able to keep up the work by themselves. They’re great vehicles for findings, revealings and transparancy. But they’re endangered by their voluntary character: things only gets uncovered if we’re lucky enough to have a dedicated, well-formulated and -connected man on the scene of crime. And the voluntary setup is to often much to fragile in terms of ressources to keep on digging, when things gets complex.

A few established media will be able to keep up the work – particularly niche-sites with long-tail potentials (which will only give us exactly this: niche-coverage of niche-subjects).
Most established media won’t. there’s simply not enough money for high-cost news production in a world where established media will have to fight the googles, facebooks and craigslists of this planet in the battle for the advertising dollar.

This is what I document in my latest report: that an average article in established Danish online media only makes $188 in advertising revenues. When the rent, the servers, the sales staff are all paid, not much is left for journalism. Read on:

[Download "Economics of news: the case for qualitative journalism on the internet" as pdf]