Wasting Time

Imagine my joy reading the press release from Outsell discussing their new report. It’s about how much time people waste doing research themselves. 5.4 billion lost hours, according to them. They also show that professionals are turning to research professionals for help.

I wanted to point you to Center for Media Research – but the link isn’t working. Hmmm. So here are the highlights from their article about the report:

Search For Information Wasting Professionals’ Time

Anthea Stratigos, CEO of Outsell, reporting on the survey results, “2001 vs. 2005: Research Study Reveals Dramatic Changes Among Information Consumers,” concludes that professionals are shifting away from their Internet research methods of just four years ago to more efficiently gather information and get on with their jobs. They are now looking more to their peers and colleagues, “alerting” services, and other conveniences.

Comparing the new research with results from 2001 shows a number of trends, says the report:

• Today’s users are backing off from self-service models and relying more on information intermediaries
• Users of all kinds are increasingly interested in competitive information
• The time users spend gathering information has increased from 8 to 11 hours per average workweek, and that “gathering time” has also increased in relation to the time spent analyzing and applying it.
• Another change in this period is a strong consolidation of search engine preferences around Google, compared to the six search engines that reached reasonable numbers in 2001
• Discretionary spending for content is down among end users, a trend that puts fee-based commercial vendors at risk compared to ad-based ones