• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, August 2, 2010

Long form, short form, billions of streams ... whatever. When it comes to raw market share, online video consumption accounts for only 3.9% of our time spent on the Internet, according to Nielsen's "What Americans Do Online" study released this morning. Don't bemoan that seemingly fractional share of media mind share that goes to video, however. Nielsen notes that video is the only category other than online gaming, search and social networking to gain share in the last year. Our streaming multimedia usage climbed 12% since June 2009, while e-mail use plummeted 28% in its share and portal use was off 19%.

The reason for the overall declines in share is the staggering growth in social networking, which now accounts for 22.7% of all time spent online, up from 15.8% a year ago. Gaming, the second most popular activity online, also increased its share 10% to 10.2% of our time online.

Which is not to say video is a minor player. In fact, the overall volume of streams per month passed the 10 billion mark in June, according to Nielsen's count. Overall, the average Internet user in the U.S. spent 3 hours and 15 minutes watching streaming media in June. And on mobile, video continues to grow, increasing its share of overall mobile access time spent 20%, taking share from news and sports.

As Nielsen analyst Dave Martin points out, the remarkable takeaway from these stats is just how narrowly focused out Internet activity is even after all of these years. "Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the Web, 40% of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities -- social networking, playing games and emailing, leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie." Even more remarkable is how poorly the time spent metric maps against revenue sources. The center of the monetization universe on the Web, search, is responsible for a mere 3.5% of our online time.

But Nielsen's numbers are an apt reminder of another fundamental disconnect between users and providers throughout Internet history. From its beginning media companies saw the Web as another publishing platform. Sure, they accommodated these newfangled forms of "interactivity" with users. On occasion, publishers would even talk with the great mass of eyeballs. But basically the content providers saw the Internet as the next great publishing platform, another venue through which customers would simply consumer more content. But from the beginning, users themselves defined the Web primarily as a communications platform. Publishers wanted the medium to be more like TV and print but users conceived and used it more like a phone, to connect one-to-one with one another.