In internet terms, I’m quite late on posting this, although I did see it a while back.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail give us a few interesting stats that really re-inforce the speculation the mainstream media is on the down:

• TV: network TV had its lowest ratings week ever in July.
• Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. For the year, CD album sales are down 4.2%; although digital single downloads (still less than 10% of the business) are up 77% and are nearly making up the difference in revenue terms. 
• Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
• DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
• Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.

mixed success:

• Magazines: ad revenues are up 3.7% although the total number of ad pages is flat (they’re charging more per page). Newsstand sales are at an all-time low, while total circulation was down 0.3% last year.
• Books: up slightly so far this year (but still lagging behind overall retail growth).

On the up:

• Box Office: is up by 5.8% so far this year (but still down 4.2% from 2004).
• Videogames: The long slump caused by the next-gen hardware
  transition (Xbox-to-Xbox 360 and PS2-to-forthcoming-PS3) seems to have
  finally ended. June sales were up 25%.
• Internet advertising: is on pace to grow by 21% this year. Google’s revenues grew by 77% in the most recent quarter.

Eric Kintz added to the story with some even more interesting stats:

Consumer generated media

YouTube announced in July that viewers are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site. Nielsen/NetRatings reported that weekly U.S. Web traffic to video sharing site YouTube grew 75 percent in the week ending July 16th, from 7.3 million to 12.8 million unique visitors. Among the top 25 Web brands ranked by unique audience, YouTube was the fastest growing from January to June 2006, increasing 297 percent. The number of Web pages viewed has grown even faster, increasing 515 percent. (See my post on YouTube.)

Blogs

The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months or so. It is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago. Technorati now tracks 50 million blogs and is most probably underestimating the overall number of blogs (see my post on French blogging). The total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second. This is about double the volume of about a year ago.

Social networks

MySpace has 75 million users, 15 million daily unique logins, is growing by a massive 240,000 new users per day, and is generating nearly 30 billion monthly page views (that

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