Where the Kids Are
Today’s teens are more engaged than ever in social media and online games
This is the last of a three-part series on teen behavior online. For Part One, click here. For Part Two, click here.
We already know that teens—boys and girls aged 12 to 17—are online in massive numbers, with 97 percent of the U.S.’s nearly 25 million teens spending an average of 18.5 hours a month on the Internet.
But what do teens do with all that time online? Well, for one thing, they love their games. According to one eMarketer report, 78 percent of online teens in the U.S. play games online—all kinds of them, from massive multi-player fantasies like World of Warcraft to simple racing games and shoot ’em ups. Teens also love instant messaging, with 68 percent swapping stories in quick soundbites. And they are highly engaged by social media: According to eMarketer, 58 percent of teens have a social network profile (though 66 percent of teen girls have a profile vs. 50 percent for boys).
Teens and social media
OK, so teens are getting social online. So what? Well, some conventional wisdom says that the Internet is making people anti-social. But we think that’s a myth, and new research shows that the Internet fosters a sense of community among teens. In fact, says eMarketer, 14.9 million teens used social networks in 2008. By 2013, that number is expected to rise to 17.9 million.
Keeping in touch is vital to today’s teens. The same report says that 91 percent of teens using social media sites use them to stay in touch with friends; 72 percent use them to make plans with their pals, and 49 percent make new friends via social media sites. (And that doesn’t just go for teens. In fact, the author of this post—26 years past his teens—has made many friends online, and has even been to a formal dinner at London’s oldest restaurant, Rules, with people he met via social media.)
Teens and games
As we noted above, 78 percent of teens online play games online. But, according to a Pew study, games appear to matter more to boys than to girls, with 39 percent of boys saying they are daily gamers vs. just 22 percent for girls. According to the same study, 80 percent of those boys play five or more different game genres. The most popular game genres include racing, puzzles, sports-related games and action/adventure games. Where do teens play these games? Forty-eight percent play on mobile devices, 60 percent play on other portable devices, 73 percent play on computers, and 86 percent play on consoles.
So what’s the upshot for advertisers? Well, for one thing, you’ve got to go where your audience is. Investing now in social media and games is probably a good bet for capturing customers now that you may have for a lifetime. Second, you’ve got to appeal to teens’ broader sense of community. They’re not the selfish, texting-happy little twerps they’re sometimes shown to be on TV. In fact, teens today have a very powerful sense of connectedness and responsibility to their communities.
Yahoo! reaches 72 percent of online U.S. teens. They spend nine percent of all their time online with us. Through services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, Yahoo! Games, as well as our alliances with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, Yahoo! has become more essential than ever to teens’ daily lives.
For more information on how you can promote your business among America’s largest and most engaged online audience, visit Yahoo! Advertising.
—Michael Mattis, the “Dick Clark of Blogging”
Sources:
eMarketer: Kids and Teens: Growing Up Virtual, May, 2009
eMarketer: Teens on Social Networks, April .,2009
eMarketer,: Kids and Teens Communication Revolutionaries, Nov., 2008
Pew/Internet: Fresh Demographics on Teen and Adult Game Play & How Games May Teach Kids to be Good Citizens, March, 2009
(Image by inno’vision via Flickr, CC 2.0)
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[ 1 comment | Categories: Audiences, Industry Trends, Insights, Research, Targeting ]
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