Web 2.0 hits the boomer crowd

Here's some interesting data for all you Web 2.0 afficianados (and we dabblers):

Pew Internet: Video sharing:
"48% of internet users have been to video-sharing sites such as YouTube and the daily traffic to such sites on a typical day has doubled in the past year. The basic findings in a national phone survey that ended in December show:

# 48% of internet users said they had ever visited a video-sharing site such as YouTube. A year ago, in December 2006, 33% of internet users said they had ever visited such sites. That represents growth of more than 45% year-to-year.

# 15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site 'yesterday' -- the day before they were contacted for our survey. A year ago, 8% had visited such a site 'yesterday.' Thus, on an average day, the number of users of video sites nearly doubled from the end of 2006 to the end of 2007."

If you drill down into the sub data (get the PDF), you'll see that boomers (50-64) went up 58%. Income ranging $50K to 74.9K increased 89%! Both of these are over 50% for having ever used a video site. Statistics on those who used such a site "yesterday" is up nearly 100% on all categories - and ranging between 15 and 20 percent on all categories.

Means we are getting away from niche users with great bandwidth (big categories are 18-29 and "some college" are the biggest users = college students with access to university backbones) and moving into other households - mostly those who are better heeled, but is pretty uniform across bandwidth users.

My mentors (Williams and Campbell) are really into how well this drives up your rankings on Google, and how this can bring users to your site.

Obviously, if you can offer audio and video, this is more the scene people would like to experience. Make your offerings viral-quality (short, pithy, funny) and you could have a great lead-in.

As broadband increases, people will continue to get more and more of their data there. Since sales yearly are increasing at now 30%, year over year, this is a real cash cow. (And here's hoping Congress can keep their greedy hands off it indefinately...)

So make your videos and have a great time at it. And make a fortune at it.