How Coronavirus Has Changed Our Online Activity

newspapers and less on partisan sites. And video games have seen an increase while sports have lost out. Nathaniel Popper, reporter at the New York Times, joins us for how we are spending our lives online during the pandemic. Thanks for joining us, Nathaniel, Thank you for having me. I wanted to talk a little bit about how our lives have changed because of coronavirus, all the social distancing that we're practicing. Obviously, Americans are spending a lot more time

at home and increasingly are living their lives online. And these are things that we've been doing for a long time, but now we have this kind of moment you look and see how it's changing slightly. We're always looking for different ways to entertain ourselves, whether it's our Netflix or Facebook or YouTube's. But one thing that's changing is that we're turning away slightly from our phones. When the trend

before that was everything was mobile. Everybody was working on mobile platforms, how to optimize videos and things for mobile. We're taking a turn back. We have our computers at home and we're working on those things a little bit more.

That was a really interesting finding here. We put together a bunch of data that we pulled to look at how our behavior changed really in the course of just a few weeks, and you see these pretty dramatic changes in online behavior that is obviously very unusual, but these

are unusual times. And one of the things that stuck out to us was that these sites that were seeking out for entertainment for social connections, so Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, all of those services have seeing the traffic on their apps declining at the same time that their websites have seen just skyrocketing traffic. So Facebook traffic to their website has gone up twenty basically the matter of a few days, and their app, which used to be what everybody was checking,

has sort of been limping along. And I think it's almost as if we're sort of remembering the virtue of looking at a big computer screen rather than squinting down at our phone all day, right exactly, we have the luxury of using our desktops and our laptops more the other thing. Obviously, this is one that we know, video chats. It's definitely having a moment right now. People are connecting

all sorts of ways on different apps. I mean, there's obviously FaceTime, there's Zoom is a huge one, but there's a few other ones that people are gravitating towards right now because they need something more than just the video chat. They want fun backgrounds, and they want other stuff to help kind of spruce that part of it up. It's really notable that it feels like just sort of connecting by text is not enough in this time where we

can't see people because of social distancing. We're not allowed to get together with our friends and family, and so the only way we can see each other is through video. And that has helped a bunch of services that really were not big ones before this house party. I think it had some history of being popular, it had been training at some point, but it was really kind of limping along and over the last few weeks again it's

seen a traffic shoot up. And it allows essentially, as the name would suggest, people to gather together in a video chat room, somewhat like Zoom does, but there's also games involved. It's fun, it's about socializing, it's about being together. It's not just about doing business. Just specifically, some friends posting up how they were on the house party thing and I had to go look into because I hadn't

heard about it before. But yeah, that's because the same thing they we're doing, playing the games, trying to have some fun other ways than just the traditional video chat. This is more than FaceTime, and so I think yes, so much of the changing patterns is in that direction of finding ways to connect more deeply when we're feeling

cut off from each other. The other sort of interesting trend in that direction is with our neighbors and locally, because we're thinking so much more about the local businesses and our local community. Is coronavirus here, as it made it into the local hospital, What are the numbers around me? And so on that front, you have social media network next Door, which has been popular, but it's still a relatively small player in the social media world. But again

it has just taken off over the last few weeks. Obviously, a lot of people are working from home, students that have had their schools closed, which is basically all of them, they're taking classes from home, so on that front, Zoom has definitely having a moment with a lot of students. Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams are company I heart media. We're using Microsoft Teams to connect and do a virtual meetings and all that. So these are also having a moment.

But the thing that comes with that is privacy concerns. I know Zoom specifically had a lot of privacy concerns with Zoom bombing and a couple of other glass as well. It feels like Zoom more than any other company has benefited from this. I think there's no company that's emerged from this more strongly, seeing their stock overtake uber in terms of the size of the company the market capitalization.

But along with that, as so often I think happens in the tech world when something takes off, as you realize that they're not actually ready for prime time yet, and there just been this litany of security concerns that have come up. People being able to log in snoop

on other people's traffic. Of course, this issue of zoom bombing, where people basically intrude, often in offensive ways, into other people's zoom conference is and I think it's this inevitable tale of Silicon Valley where it's not quite ready for

the success that it has. And that's why Zoom was so interesting to me on how it took off, especially with schools and online classrooms, because of that, it was still fairly new and as exactly as you said, when it's new and hot and everybody wants to use it, all the other little cracks starts showing after that. It was very surprising to me that Zoom took off so much because of that, especially for online classes when you want something to be a little more stable for the students,

and obviously all the privacy concerns there. It sort of is a reminder of just how quickly behavior has changed. Obviously, video chat was something that existed before, but it was not something that all that many people were relying on before. It was not something people were thinking about so much before. Obviously, you know, I think in the business world, slack was the big sort of trend, the big growth pattern because

you're chatting with people in between seeing them. Now you can't see them, and so you need a way to do that, and Zoom has obviously been the play to go. But it's going to be interesting to see as time goes on how much people move back towards things like Microsoft teams maybe hangouts from other places that have a bit more of a track record, especially with security. Now, this next angle of how coronavirus has changed the way

we internet, I think it's a good one. So people have gone to their local newspaper sites and their local TV stations. They've turned to them more for news updates. They obviously want to know what's going on in their communities a lot, and partisan sites those have maybe not had huge decreases, but at least stagnated at least with traffic. And people are turning to a lot more large media organizations sites that they trust, especially things like New York

Times and the Washington Post. You know, when the President says a lot of things like oh, fake news and whatnot, and you know it has its place when things start getting heavily politicized. But it's good to see that people are turning to these local sites more now there's definitely a sense of the last few years have been all about skepticism towards the media. Obviously, partisan news sites have

fed that skepticism of corporate media. But you come to a time where you just want the facts, and I think people are turning back to those traditional sources and saying, if I just want the facts, this is still the place I'm going to go. I don't necessarily want the opinions. I want to know what the numbers are in my community, what restaurants are shut down. I want to know how

much things are spreading. And so you're seeing more mainstream sites which have in many ways struggled in recent years. Those have been the places where people have been going. And unfortunately this is not necessarily meant a great sort of business boom for these companies because a lot of

these companies make most of their money from advertisers. And so even if you have a lot of viewers, if advertisers are sort of dropping out, which is what's happening now with the economy, the sites are continuing to struggle. Local newspapers are continuing to struggle economically even as their readership, you know, is skyrocketing. Two sites that some big increases. C NBC, the business news website, has seen a huge increase, and the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Obviously people are pointing to them a lot of hard numbers and guidance on social distancing and whatnot, so they've seen big numbers. And the last section we want to talk about video games. Obviously, sports have dropped off a huge bit. Uh. ESPN website has gone down. Things like Twitch and TikTok. People watching other people play video games and interact on that scene has increased. Yeah, I mean Twitch is the largest service to watch other people play

video games, and they were already that before this. But when you look at the chart in their daily numbers, you just see right as social distancing sets in, you just see their numbers take off explode. And it's one of the only forms of entertainment, at least live entertainment that's left to us out there. And you know, I think TikTok is an interesting one. I mean it's it's

an app that's only on the phone. You might think that this might hurt them somewhat, but I think silly entertainment sort of a distraction from all of this waitiness is something that people still want, and so I was struck by the fact that TikTok was one of the apps where things actually haven't changed that much for them.

They just keep getting more and more popular. That that idea of watching somebody get hit in the back of the head with a sponge by their wife is like, you know, it's it's something we we need just as much now as we did two months ago. Nathaniel Popper, reporter at the New York Times, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks again for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been your daily coronavirus update. Don't

forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So follow us in iHeart Radio or where every get your podcast.