There was an interesting story in the morning papers today coming out of Carbon Hill. Ala.

If regulators approve, residents in Carbon Hill have will no longer be able to sign up for landline-based telephone service. AT&T customers would have to switch to wireless or high-speed Internet phone service.

We are becoming, more and more, an Internet-based society. This may be one of the biggest societal changes since the mass migrations from farm to city a hundred years ago.

But how comfortable are we with that change?

A new survey says, not very.

The TRUSTe 2014 Consumer Confidence Privacy Report is based on an independent online survey of 2,000 American adults. Pollster Harris Interactive conducted it at the end of 2013 on behalf of TRUSTe.

Bottom line: the report concludes that, even though we use the Internet for everything from work to play, we remain nervous about who’s watching us when were online. 

An astounding 92% of respondents said they worry about their online privacy. That’s up 3% from last year.

Asked why they’re worried, 58% said they worry about businesses sharing their personal information.

And nearly 50% said they were concerned about having their online behavior tracked so companies could target them with ads and customer-relationship content.

Despite the concerns, there does not seem to be any increased concern about the government peeking at the history files on our browsers. Fewer than 40% of respondents said that the constant media drumbeat over government surveillance programs was a concern.

That’s far less than you’d expect, given the wall-to-wall coverage of the NSA, FISA courts and other programs.

What we don’t know is any long-term harm to online customer relationships as consumer trust in business privacy practices continues to drop.

The good news is that three-quarters of us are now more likely to look for privacy certification on a website, making it more likely we’ll transact business on sites that that meet objective standards for security.

And 70% of those surveyed said that they now feel more confident to manage their online privacy issues. But this is a mixed blessing.

They’re more confident in controlling their privacy because they’re taking steps that reduce their online footprint with businesses. They are now

-83% less likely to click through on online ads

-80% more likely to avoid mobile apps that they think might endanger their privacy

-74% less likely to use location-tracking on their smartphones

In the 1955 play “Inherit the Wind” by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the protagonist, a defense attorney in a 1920s creationism trial, turns to the jury in his summation and notes that "progress has never been a bargain." You have to pay for it. You can have the telephone but "you lose privacy and the charm of distance." Air travel may break the bonds of gravity, but "the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline."

The Internet marketplace seems to be like that. It’s Harrods’s, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the neighborhood multiplex all rolled into one. But for that convenience there’s a price. The price is never being quite certain whether somebody’s lurking around the Internet corner waiting to steal your data.

And it looks like American consumers are still trying to come to grips with that.

I’m in the process of starting work with a new client, a tech company run by some of the brightest people I know. Job 1: re-work the website.

We’ve made a few recommendations to them. The problem is that in American business we just don’t know when to stop. More is always better. If you are an automaker and have a top selling electric sedan it won’t be long before you extend that brand to an electric coupe, an electric sports car and may be an electric SUV.

It’s the same with producing Internet content. Ideas that are basically sound get taken to the max. So you end up with websites that are all video,  or sites that have more animation than a Disney studio.

You end up with blogs that look like your high school intern wrote them. Oh, wait. Your high school intern did write them.

So here are a few thoughts on Internet content creation.

Video is good. It’s the thing. But it’s not the only thing. ADHD is a disorder. Fortunately, it’s not yet become part of the human genome. There are some people who actually still don’t mind reading.

A healthy mix of media and copy is good. You’re reading a blog on a page that has one video, although it’s been built to display more. Right now this seems to be the right combination of words and pictures. We know we can always change it.

Second, not every web video has to go viral. The fact is that in most cases there will be a limited number of people who are interested in what your business posts.

The American Double Eagle $20 gold piece is one of the rarest coins in the world. But outside of American historians or members of the Numismatic Society, I’m not sure who gives a rip. So a smartphone video of your four-year old pulling a Double Eagle out of a trunk in Great Aunt Tilly’s attic isn’t going to pull big numbers for you.

Rather than finding that one puppy out there that can open a box of cookies for your toddler with his paws, look for something relevant for the several hundred fans your product, company or website attracts.

Finally, it’s not necessarily about building numbers, unique visitors or page views. Unless he puts a million-dollar order on his gold card on the site, a unique visitor isn’t really much good to you.

What’s better: one unique visitor you never see again, or a million visitors that come back and buy from you each time, or at least visit your site frequently and learn about your products, services, and expertise?

What more important than unique visitors are sticky visitors. You want visitors to your site to come back often.

I help manage an annual conference. This will be our 17^thyear. It’s a pretty arcane affair, aimed at the people who build and manage theelectronic payment systems that distribute various government benefits, like food stamps, now called SNAP, or unemployment insurance.

For 16 years we’ve attracted between 200 and 350 attendees. We always get pressure to jazz up the event to attract more people. But the reality is that if you were to go state-by-state and count, there are probably no more than 350-400 people involved in electronic benefits. Nationwide. And we’ve got most of them. And they come every year.

To us it’s more important that our attendees be sticky rather than unique. A unique visitor to us is worth about $600. Some of our people have been coming since the first show.  Accounting for the difference in registration fees over the years, that’s a $7,000 customer for us.

And we didn’t have to post one puppy video.