What’s Hotter: Gambling or Uploading Video?

Which do you think is the bigger online phenomenon: online gambling or uploading video? Neither, according to Parks Associates: they're about equal.

You can look at it one of two ways: either uploading video to sites like YouTube is way more popular than anybody thought, or online gambling has taken a big tumble in the wake of ongoing ethical and criminal scandals.

In any case, market research firm Parks Associates let loose with a bit of a head scratcher today: according to a new study, about eight percent of Internet users regularly upload material to video sharing Web sites like YouTube, while about ten percent of Internet users report they regularly gamble online.

Where is all this video coming from? According to Parks, about a quarter of all Internet users own a mobile phone, and digital cameras—many with video capabilities—have an almost “70 percent penetration rate” in the United States (what ever that means). The prevalence of video-capable mobile phones and digital cameras are contributing to the amount of video being recorded and uploaded to Internet sites.

Parks Associates full study, Digital Media Habits, also finds online “video uploaders” are likely to be young (predominantly 28 to 24 years old), with men only slightly more likely than women to upload video.

“We’re witnessing a phenomenon that will have recognizable cultural and social effects across the country,” said John Barrett, Parks Associates’ director of research. “Anything you do can be recorded and uploaded, where it is readily available to your boss, your family, your church. Ready or not, the camera’s now rolling.”

Parks Associates says it surveyed 2,060 Internet users over the age of 13 (although it doesn’t say how or when), and that its numbers have a margin of error of two percent either way – which makes the study’s results for the number online gamblers and online photo uploaders statistically equivalent. Amusingly, they also find the number of online gamblers and folks who listen to podcasts to be pretty similar, at ten and eleven percent, respectively. Guess that makes podcasts only slightly less chancy than putting money into an an online poker game run out of some hard-to-spell Caribbean sovereignty.