Fri, August 7, 2009 12:15 PM EST

The Internet and How It Relates
to The Fifteen-Year-Old Demographic

Oliver McIntyre

by Oliver McIntyre

A paragraph in my last post focused on our everyday lives, conversations, and the fact that our personalities differ dramatically when we speak to different types of people. I went on to state that we must apply the same thinking to web. We now have very distinct online user demographics like the full-time mom, the professional woman, the baby-boomer, etc. All have very different wants and requirements.

Many of the emails I received following the post asked me to elaborate on that paragraph so this post is going to do just that. So, let’s look at the teenage demographic for a moment and the 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern that anecdotally evaluated and defined the online habits of his friends.

Matthew Robson, an intern from a London school, was asked to write a report on teenagers likes and dislikes, which was very interesting and made the front page of the Financial Times. His report highlighted Twitter as meaningless to the teenage demographic and went on to state that online advertising is pointless.

We all know that teenagers are the early-adopters online, but do they not use Twitter? Not according to Mathew saying teenagers do not use Twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realize that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up cell credit and they would rather text friends with those credits). They also feel that no one is viewing their profiles, so their tweets are pointless.

He goes on to state that traditional media – television, radio, and newspapers – are all losing ground. Robson states that he knew no one that reads a newspaper regularly since most cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarized on the Internet or TV. Teens see adverts on websites - pop ups, banner ads - as "extremely annoying and pointless," but he goes on to say that, "most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as it often creates humorous and interesting content. Downloading films off the Internet is not popular as the films are usually bad quality and have to be watched on a small computer screen and there is a risk of viruses”.

He talks about game consoles like Wii, which are now able to connect to the Internet and offer free voice chat between users, have emerged as a more popular choice for chatting with friends than the phone.

We must first understand the web and the user, then set about generating content that not only creates an expectation the very first time but also will fulfill the desire thereafter.

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