On Weibo I saw the infographic below, posted 2 weeks ago on the Socially Aware Blog. There are a couple of interesting statistics on there, but 2 of them really blew me away.
The first one is a comparison between Facebook and Google+. The average American visitor spends 6.75 hours per month on Facebook, which seems reasonable to me. But if you look at Google+, there the time spent is only 3 minutes! Google+ may have a lot of users, but most are users by default because of their Google profile and never seem to use it.
The other one is about how much time Americans spend on online video sites. YouTube is the winner with 3 hours per month (a lot less than I had expected), but number 2 is… Tudou! U.S. customers spend an average of 2.5 hours on Tudou per month, the same time as on Hulu.
Of course this is only the average time that people who visit Tudou (in the US obviously a much small number than YouTube visitors) spend on the site, but it’s still a lot of time considering the fact that Tudou is hosted in China and is therefore relatively slow. And of course now I’m wondering how Tudou ended up on this list at all…
I’m increasingly skeptical about all these measurements. Ok, for video’s it might be doable: you watch a video, or you do not watch one.
But most social media run for me 24/7 on my devices (with the exception of a few hours of sleep). How do you count that? Even when you are comparing social media, running Google+ is on for 24/7 in my case? And now Google is consolidating all its services (It looks like Gmail, Drive and Blogger are some that will be integrated soon – http://www.fonstuinstra.net/?p=2150); should you include the time you are running Gmail for the time you use social media?
Time for some of these measurement companies to clear their desks and come with something solid.
Quite a lot of Korean news and drama comes from tudou as well, so we spend a lot of time on tudou as well 🙂
Fons, I agree with you, it’s hard to measure this for most sites. Internally companies know pretty good the time people spend on their site (e.g. 3 minutes no action on a SNS means user left), but using Google Analytics you can’t see it I think.
Joop, how is the speed for you in Holland? Is it similar to YouTube in China? Any times of day when it is better than average (e.g. at night when China is asleep)?
This “consolidation” of Google services is a big nuissance. I already have to run Google, Youtube and Gmail in separate browsers to make sure Google Inc does not snoop on me. I like Gmail, but if it continues in this direction and G+ is imposed on me (like, for instance, when I want to review an app on G Play), then I will switch to some other email provider. OK, the servers and programmers must be paid for, and I have no problem to pay a monthly subscription. But there is not a choice, Gmail only comes in the “paid by ads” flavor. I even started wondering how much am I actually worth as a user? Maybe much more than I think, and maybe that might also be the reason why no paid email is offered, coz that would make much smaller profit than is made on me and on my data now.