Do These Numbers Add Up?

The recent Pew/​Internet Millennials report suggests that young people are far more con­nected than any other age group. They are 50% more likely to have created a social net­working profile, 40% more likely to use Twitter and nearly four times as likely to have made a video of them­selves. They’re also avidly mobile – with 41% of respond­ents only having a mobile as opposed to a landline and sending nearly twice as many texts and the next-​​oldest gen­er­a­tional group.

Regular readers may recall that in February I reported on a Pingdom study that basic­ally said the opposite of this research – that the majority of social network users were much older. The age splits in that study were much narrower than Pew’s and can’t be directly compared, but non­ethe­less sug­gested a much more even age dis­tri­bu­tion in social media usage than this does. One clue as to the dis­parity comes in a later graph that covers what respond­ents had done in the last 24 hours.

Here, there’s much less of a contrast between the 18–29 year-​​old cohort and those aged 30–45. Maybe one thing you might reas­on­ably say from this is that younger people are more inclined to try out new things. Whether they stick with them and use them on a regular basis is much harder to call.

BTW, where did the expres­sion ‘silent’ come from for over-​​65s? I thought ‘boomer’ and ‘Gen X’ were bad enough, but ‘silent’… I would suggest the author has not met many 65-​​year-​​olds.

On a related note, in a research round-​​up from e-​​Marketer, using yet a third way of dividing age-​​groups, there’s the sug­ges­tion that blogging is a major force in younger people’s online activity. Apparently, 40% of the respond­ents who said they wrote blogs were aged 18–25.

Perhaps com­fort­ingly, the main reason given for blogging – by all age groups – is for pleasure: ‘self-​​expression’ is the #1 answer, closely followed by ‘fun’. Respondents could choose multiple answers, but non­ethe­less less than a third thought they were going to make money out of their blogs. I’m pleased that most people have woken up from the blogging-​​for-​​benjamins delusion. There are two ways to make money from blogging: (1) get someone to pay you to write their blog for them and (2) get a proper job on the basis of your blog. Option 3 – where Google AdSense puts a roof over your head – is not available.

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• Age of Social Network Users
• The blog report
• Be Good