You probably don’t need me to tell you that video is fast becoming the common currency for online communications.  But even so the figures are truly amazing. According to a new report from Cisco global Internet traffic is going to rise three fold by 2017. By then half the world’s projected population – or 3.6 billion people – will be Internet users. And video will be responsible for 70% of that traffic. To put in another way, the equivalent of five million years of video viewing will cross the Internet each month!

That’s a lot of content. We also know that much of this video will be integrated and accessed through social media sites and that the driver for much of this will be mobile. In fact another recent report from Ericsson says that mobile video traffic is growing by 60% annually and by 2018 will account for half the global network traffic.

So what effect is all this content having? Well for content providers of all shapes and sizes it represents enormous opportunity. Barriers to entry have all but disappeared and the Internet affords distribution possibilities that previously would have required millions of dollars to secure. But on the other hand it also produces a lot of noise. There’s so much content out there it can be hard to get your message heard. Finding the right audience has never been more important.

And what effect is this content having on consumers – particularly younger people? Well, my final interviewee at the recent American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference in San Francisco was the neurologist Baroness Susan Greenfield – watch the interview here.

Susan talked about many issues but perhaps her main focus was the effect of social media on the young brain. So I pushed her as to how healthy this explosion of content is. Interestingly she insisted that this wasn’t about policing. But rather about encouraging all of us to have a sense of value and worth that transcends video and social media. As she put it – there’s more to life than having 500 friends on facebook.

– Stephen Horn, CEO WebsEdgeJordan Ανδρικά • Summer SALE έως -50%