The age old mantra that “numbers don’t lie” isn’t quite accurate. I scour the web and other repositories to find numbers, and I find that most reports conflict with each other. It doesn’t matter really, as I’m looking for trends for what’s happened in the past, where we are, and where we are going.

This report elevates us a bit higher as we see that the often overlooked growth segment is online gaming –not social networking. Here’s what I found interesting from StreetInsider:

“The year-over-year growth rate for frequent online gamers was 79%, significantly higher than the growth rate for users of social networking (46%). However, the growth rate for frequent users of video streaming sites was 123%, which could pose a significant challenge to the gaming industry in capturing the online leisure time of Internet users.”

The report doesn’t suggest what type of online gaming is being used, is it a downloaded application like World of Warcraft or is it a flash based game out of Kongregate?

“Thirty-four percent of U.S. adult Internet users play online games on a weekly basis, compared with 29% who watch short online videos and 19% who visit social networking sites with the same frequency.”

In a somewhat similar vein, this report from Reuters shows that users and consuming more content on the web than participating, so maybe gaming and social networking are just for a smaller segment of activities. I’m also curious to find out the mobile angles that this research covers. At some point, if this continues, there may be some direct tools for the Web Strategist to use games to reach their audience.

If you want stats and info about Social Networks, check out my first monthly digest for August.