Thirty Percent of Home Web Surfers Have the TV On: Nielsen

Internet activity and TV watching often go hand-in-hand, according to new survey.

More than 30% of in-home Internet activity takes place while the user is also watching television. But only about 4% of the home TV audience is also working online, according to data just published by the Nielsen Company’s TV/Internet convergence panel.

In terms of audience makeup, Nielsen found that the heaviest Internet users are also the biggest television viewers. The top fifth of at-home Internet users also spend more than 250 minutes a day watching TV, compared to 220 minutes for people who do not go online at all.

Conversely, those who watch the least television also have the lowest Internet usage rates.

The newly-launched Nielsen TV/Internet convergence panel consists of nearly 3,000 people in more than 1,000 households who were either part of Nielsen’s existing national TV sample or were newly outfitted for the convergence research, done using Nielsen’s “People Meter” TV monitoring platform and downloadable software for tracking Web use.

Nielsen researchers stressed that this first snapshot of the broadcast-and-broadband audience merely indicated that online activity supplements mass-media TV viewing.

“It’s too early to draw any firm conclusions about behavior, but the early trends seem to indicate that online usage is complementing, not substituting for, traditional television viewing,” said Nielsen senior vice president of client insights Howard Shimmel in a release. “We will be watching this trend carefully to see how television viewing drives Internet usage and vice versa.”

It has long been assumed that a large number of the TV audience also multi-tasks by surfing the Internet when the set is on. The impact of this trend for marketers depends on the channels in which they convey their messages and the amount of online/offline integration they employ. For advertisers who use TV spots to drive viewers to w Web site, this could provide proof of their concept.

But marketers who rely heavily on grabbing users’ attention with expensive or highly produced broadcast commercials have in the past expressed some dismay that viewers’ attention is being shared with anything else—especially something as potentially engaging as the Web.

Other findings from the first Nielsen convergence report:

* Members of the teenage demographic are most likely to have logged simultaneous TV-and-Internet time, but adults 35-54 posted the highest number of simultaneous at-home minutes.

About half the convergence panel participants had viewed some streamed content online, with female teens the most active video stream viewers (82%), followed by male teens (64%), men 18-34 (57%) and men 35-54 (55%).

Streaming video does usually opens immediately with a click and streams progressively to the browser after buffering, rather than requiring a file download from a site. Last week survey results produced by ABI Research suggested that video downloads from the Web were really only popular with consumers under 30.