I’ve been playing around with the new Google Insights for Search, which is targeted to advertisers but is terribly interesting for anyone interested in media issues. Here’s a comparison of searches for newspaper, blog, and magazine:
Leaving aside the obvious qualifications about the limitations of this metric, the fact that blogs have become more popular in relation to newspapers is obvious and only interesting to see it visualized so clearly. But the slower rise of blogs in the U.S. vs. worldwide is not obvious to me, nor is the vastly higher (and growing) popularity of newspapers in Nigeria (one might guess without any specific knowledge of Nigeria that the technically sophisticated folks online in Nigeria would be more likely to access blogs). It’s worth following the links to see further breakdowns of the data.
Much of my time will be lost (mostly productively) fiddling with this tool. The tool critically includes csv exports for all searches as well with terms of use that allow personal or research use, which will allow this data easily to be mashed up with other sources of data. One complaint is the lack of support for easily embedding the resulting graphs on other pages (I had to screen capture the above charts).
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About Nigeria, it is still true even today that the Newspapers are still in the lead. The main reason is because of the lack of basic infrastructure to support internet access. Power failure is a major issue. Poverty is equally having its toll as very few can afford a PC or laptop. Most use internet cafes. Also is the high cost of internet access. As at today the most reliable internet access (3GHz)is provided by MTN which cost about $66/month for a 3G data transfer (upload+download). Watching of online video is almost impossible. Until there is cheap access to the internet, the trend for Nigeria will not change much in the coming years.