Just another sign of how our world and use of media are changing, and how “video-fied” we’re all getting: Ad Age‘s subhead for its review of last year’s top “print” apps was “App Revenue Suggests Readers Want ‘Bells and Whistles’ Like Video and Interactivity.” To make articles more “accessible” to readers, magazine designers used to call for lots of “entry points” for readers – and not just “eye candy,” but charts and subheads and quotations pulled out of the text. Now the articles are increasingly on screens (like iPads and Kindles), and “entry points” are audio and video elements. Text has far from lessened in importance, especially on phones, but it’s having to share its space more and more with video. Sure, reviewers look at whether or not the app actually works (doesn’t crash), downloads fast, and can be easily navigated, but more and more they’re looking for “rich media enhancements.” Meanwhile, comScore’s latest figures on video showed that 183 million, of 85.9%, of US Internet users watched online videos (40.9 billion of them) in November “for an average of 20.5 hours per viewer.” The digital media researchers also say that 85.9% of US Internet users viewed online video, and “the total US Internet audience viewed 40.9 billion videos” that month. I think what all this says is that the rest of us are catching up with our kids – they don’t have a monopoly on digital video viewing.
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