Internet: eating away traditional media habits

The report on China's internet habits I posted about earlier has a wealth of information, but of course the relations between Internet and the traditional media has my special interest. The first take-away of chapter 5:

... [C]ompared to the survey results in 2005, the number of those who watch TV or read newspapers has dropped about 10 percent over the last two years, while the number of those who use the Internet is on the rise of 17 percent. The penetration rate of the Internet increased to 66.1 percent, surpassing the number of those who read books, and moving the Internet into the spot as third most popular form of mass media.

Compared internet users and non-users their (traditional) media use differs a lot but not always at the detriment of the traditional media. Internet users read more books, magazines and listen more to the radio. But they spend less time on TV and similar time on newspapers, although both last media lost each ten percent of its audiences over the past two years among internet users and non-users similarly.
And there is more bad news for the traditional media:

It appears that the Internet has a major on the use of traditional media, especially on television consumption. Some 22.5 percent of Internet users said they greatly reduced the amount of time spent watching TV in favor ot the Internet, and another 32.5 percent they reduced TV watching somewhat. Magazine reading also suffered; some 35.2 percent of the interviewed users said they spent less time on magazines since using the Internet. Similarly, time reading newspapers, listening to the radio and reading books, were all down with more than 30 percent.

Internet users belonged to more loyal users of the traditional media; today they still outflank the non-users in traditional media usage, but that might see a turning point in the upcoming two years.