• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 14, 2007

The explosion in online content, coupled with consumers' growing preference for instant messaging rather than email, has led to a major shift in Web usage over the past four years. As a result, content has overtaken communication as the Web's primary role, according to the Online Publishers Association's Internet Activity Index, conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings.

Indeed, since 2003, the percentage of computer time that consumers spend viewing content has risen from 34% to 47%. By contrast, the time they spend communicating has dropped from 46% to 33%--a decline of 26%.

What are the factors driving this shift in consumer Web usage patterns?

"The first is the online transition of traditionally offline activities, such as getting news, finding entertainment information or checking the weather," explained OPA president Pam Horan. "Quality content sites see a consistent pattern--major news drives traffic spikes, but traffic remains consistently higher even after the event. Major news events such as Hurricane Katrina and high-profile seasonal events such as the NCAA Final Four Basketball tournament are clearly driving consumers to engage more deeply with online content."

"New online features and communities are also leading consumers to spend a larger share of their online time with content." Horan continued. "Consumers spend considerable time with social networking sites, which serve not only as places of content, but are also increasingly important communications vehicles."

Other possible factors in the reversal of activity times include: a more accessible and much faster Internet; the increased popularity of video; the improvement in search, which allows consumers to more easily and quickly find the exact content they are looking for; the vast proliferation in niche forms of content; and the rise of instant messaging, which takes less time than email, as a key communications tool.

The percentage of time consumers devote to search also rose a marked 35% from four years ago, but still takes up only 5% of consumers' Web time. E-commerce, meanwhile, dropped 5%--from 16% of consumers' time online in 2003 to 15% in 2007.

The increase in content's share has been fairly steady in the last several years--growing 10% from 2003 to 2004, and remaining even between 2004 and 2005; growing 13% from 2005 to 2006; and growing 13% from 2006 to 2007.