Americans spend half of their leisure time online
It’s not all that surprising, but still shocking when you see it spelled out: Americans now spend roughly half of their spare time online during a typical weekday, according to the Netpop I Play report from Media-Screen, and more than half of this time is spent on entertainment and communications activities.
Forty-eight percent of young broadband users say they learn about entertainment through their online community of social networking sites, blogs, review sites and video sharing sites. Only a quarter of them say they learn about entertainment options through television. And that’s why Paul McCartney debuted his latest music video on YouTube last night.
Meanwhile, TV networks devalue their own brands by running advertisements for shoddy products, as Mark Cuban points out — which, come to think of it, has an eerie parallel in DC and Marvel Comics’s recent moves of dumping unsold ad inventory to put in house ads or ads for comics stores.