[MUSIC]
Hello, everybody.
Welcome back to the last and final session of this introductory course.
Today the topic and focus is digital media, so without any further ado,
let me basically try to motivate the pervasiveness and the power of this media.
After a 3 year gap, basically Adele releases Hello on YouTube, so
this is her hit single.
By 24th of October 2015, and this is one day away,
the video gets something like 27.7 million hits.
27 million hits within 24 hours.
Fast forward a couple of months,
by the 6th of December 2015 that number jumps to 602 million.
To get you an idea of how big that number is,
it is bigger than basically the entire population of Europe, in some sense.
Over half of those views come from mobile.
So this is kind of starting to get interesting now, right?
Over half of those views came from mobile and sales search, too.
So in some sense people, I want to say, all that is fine,
you put it out there for free.
Did it help sales?
Actually, it did.
1.1 million downloads in the very first week.
Where is all this going?
Well, it's the mobile thing that is of great interest to me, all right?
So in many places mobile is, there it is.
So that, as you can see, was taken about a month ago,
1.5 billion hits by then, in 7 months.
So you can already see mixes coming up.
You can already see fans making their own.
Well, there's going to be parodies and there's going to be fan fiction.
Fan crowdsourced commentary, and so on, on anything like this.
It's part of the nature of digital social media.
All right, now in many places, mobile is and
will continue to be the only way to access the web.
And what does that imply?
Well, by Feb 2015, the number of mobile devices on the planet exceeded
7.2 billion, which basically was more than the number of humans on the planet now,
just to put that in perspective.
This includes all the mobiles ever produced.
A lot of them, right, the older ones were probably junked already.
But still, that number was still an important milestone.
All right, some more facts.
For over half the internet population, mobile is the only way to go online.
Something which we have eluded to earlier, as well.
And the primary usage of mobile service?
Any guesses?
It's basically video watching.
That is the number one activity on mobile online.
6 billion hours of YouTube watched a month,
3 hours per Internet user per month.
So that's more than half of those hours are on mobile.
And that in some sense makes things very interesting indeed.
Right, an average human pulls out his or
her mobile a whopping 150 times a day on the average, right?
So that works out to about once every 10 minutes or 9.6 minutes.
Now because of mobile,
we are moving from in some sense going online to practically living online.
Being online will be the default mode of sorts, okay?
All right, let me in some sense proceed to a couple
of conceptual preliminaries on this, on digital social technologies.
Quick question, what are social technologies?
Can you list some examples?
Think about it, type what you feel is the answer to that.
Nothing profound, something simple, yeah.
We can basically collect and collate what's happened there.
Technology that enables social interactions at scale is
a social technology, right?
So Facebook is a social network, yes.
A bulletin board, online bulletin boards, Usenet forums back in the day
were also in some sense, are also social technologies, all right?
So everything from online bulletin boards to social networking sites
have a social component to them and
are digital in nature and hence we can call them social digital technologies.
Digital, social, it doesn't matter.
All right, which brings up the question,
what is the social part of social technologies?
What does it mean that something is social?
If you think about it,
the social part of social technology comes about because of this.
Any event or
any transaction using a social tech is not strictly private anymore.
It is relatively public, which is why email is not a social technology.
It goes from A to B.
Relatively public and hence, because it is relatively public,
it is amenable to social influence, right?
In terms of information flows, in terms of expectation setting, in terms
of building reputational capital, building social capital, you name it, all right?
A good example would be online marketplaces where I can go and see what
other people are doing, how other people value other items, a lot of these things.
And they influence my own estimation of the value of things out there.
Going wide along the line requires a social component to resonate very well.
So for instance, a lot of companies want a lot of things to go viral, right?
It doesn't always work out.
Well, the social resonance has to be there in some sense.
So that is so much with the preliminaries.
Let me in some sense, well before I go on give you a quick
around of what is going on in terms of digital advertising.
Going online, what you see out there and this is a source from The Economist,
you can basically see that among the television, newspapers, magazines,
radios, advertising channels or outlets available out there.
It is the internet which is rising at the fastest clip.
Okay, there was a brief dip in 2009, but
since then it's been up all the way and getting more social, too.
So within that Internet advertising the proportion
of dollars going into social technologies are just so
much higher as well, and that's clearly seen in the second graph.
Evolution of digital media, evolution of the early web.
So let me, in some sense, take you to where everything is coming from,
and maybe we will get some sense of where things are going to, right?
So both of them coming together.
Okay, in the mid-90s the Internet was perceived to be very different from
traditional media.
Okay, this is the early to mid 90s.
The Internet had just come about and people knew that this was somehow
different from traditional newspapers and magazines, in what way, all right?
In terms of consumer profiles, the people who read the Internet were
different from the people who read the newspapers.
And because the consumer profiles were different,
consumption opportunities were different.
And because consumption opportunities were different and profiles were different,
consumption choices were different.
Consumption patterns were different.
Consumption experiences were different, enabled partly by the medium itself.
There was interactivity, there was some degree of personalization.
And yes, because of interactivity there was also a social dimension coming into
the picture slowly, right?
So if I put a comment on a news article online,
other people could see my comment and maybe respond to that.
So there was a social dimension, too.
All right, so let us in some sense look at the history of the web.
Back in the year 1991, there was a grand total of 1 website.
By the year 1992, that number jumped to 10, 900% increase.
By the time we came to 1993, that number jumped further to 130, and so on.
A 1000% increase on the average,
which actually maintained itself throughout the golden decade of the 90s.
By 1991, 99, we had 1 million websites.
And by 2000, 17 million.
Which brings up this question of this manic proliferation of websites,
what implications did it have for media consumption, and
then we will get into digital media.
Of course, this was the beginning of digital media, what happened,
what were the implications in traditional media?
But what we do see is that per capita media consumption increased.
The average person was consuming more media than before.
There was this proliferation of content available.
However, per medium the average consumption crashed.
Maybe relevance trumps reach, all right?
Previously there was not enough choice and
people would go with whatever was available.
Reach won.
Now because there was choice available, relevance became more important.
And we will see this reach,
relevance trade off play out in the next few slides as well.
All right, so after the decade of the 90s came the early 2000s.
And in the early 2000s laptops emerged, which basically meant portability.
Not true mobility though, portability.
The genius of Steve Jobs was that while everyone saw wireless networks as designed
for phone calls, wires basically, Jobs actually put media first.
To him, that particular device, the then basic feature phone,
was actually the harbinger of potentially of an awesome media device, right?
So he basically said, the first iPhone, okay, the first smartphone,
launched less than ten years ago, June 2007.
He called it an insanely great media device.
Voice was secondary there.
Why?
Well, we can see why and we will see it soon enough, right?
And just when media disruption couldn't get worse, guess what happened?
Social media exploded on to the scene.
Implications, what happens now?