Chris Anderson has a great post on the "mainstream media meltdown"....


He takes a look on a regular basis at the key mainstream media year over year comparisons.
Mainstream media evolution
* TV: network TV had its lowest weekly ratings ever in July. CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox averaged 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute the week of July 4th, according to Nielsen Media Research. That sunk below the previous record of 21.5 million, set during the last week of July in 2005.
* Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. Album sales - including those sold via digital download - amounted to 8.91 million copies for the week ended July 23. That's the first time Nielsen SoundScan has tallied fewer than 9 million units since 1996, when the week that closed February 4 marked 8.94 million.
* Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
* DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
* Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.
I did a comparative research on the CGM side and found these stunning reverse trends:
Consumer generated media
YouTube announced in July that viewers are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site. Nielsen/NetRatings reported that weekly U.S. Web traffic to video sharing site YouTube grew 75 percent in the week ending July 16th, from 7.3 million to 12.8 million unique visitors. Among the top 25 Web brands ranked by unique audience, YouTube was the fastest growing from January to June 2006, increasing 297 percent. The number of Web pages viewed has grown even faster, increasing 515 percent. (See my post on YouTube.)
Blogs
The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months or so. It is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago. Technorati now tracks 50 million blogs and is most probably underestimating the overall number of blogs (see my post on French blogging). The total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second. This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
Social networks
MySpace has 75 million users, 15 million daily unique logins, is growing by a massive 240,000 new users per day, and is generating nearly 30 billion monthly page views (that's 10,593 page views per second). MySpace hasn't overtaken Yahoo yet in terms of page views, but they are a solid second and are ahead of giants like MSN-Microsoft, Time Warner (including AOL), eBay, Google and Facebook.
If we .... as marketers .... follow where our customers go, we will need sooner or later to make the mental shift to consumer generated media.
UPDATE: my good blogging friend Mack recently wrote a post, highlighting that MySpace had reached the 100 million user mark....
UPDATE: Steve Rubel has a great post highlighting that membership at social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace is exploding. In June, 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site. Since January 2004, the number of people visiting or taking part in one of the top online social networks has grown by over 109% (primarily driven by MySpace). Most of this growth has come about in the past 12 months alone! Social networking sites are now close to eclipsing traffic to the giants - Google and Yahoo.
Eric Kintz is VP Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for Hewlett-Packard. Read his blog here.