The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new study yesterday on Teen Content Creators and Consumers (warning PDF). The study has some great information for those of us who have a personal and professional stake in the development of web content. I’ve pulled out what I feel is the most relevant items for SEO/Ms:
19% of online youth ages 12-17 have created their own blog. That is approximately four million people. 38% of all online teens, or about 8 million young people, say they read blogs. 7% of adult internet users say they have created their own blog and 27% of online adults say they read blogs.
Older girls ages 15-17 are the most likely to blog; 25% of online girls in this age group keep a blog, compared with 15% of older boys who are online. About 18% of younger teens of both sexes blog.
Teen Content Creators say they have done an average of two content-creating activities of the five we included in the survey. Of the Content Creators, 45% have done one activity, and another 27% have done two. Sixteen percent of Content Creator teens have done three types of creating activities, and 10% have done four. Some 2% say they have done all five types of content creation activities.
Teens are not content to consume online content passively. Some have joined the ranks of those who take material they find online—such as songs, text, or images—and remix that digital material into their own creations. About one in five internet-using teens (19%) say they are content remixers, as do 18% of online adults.
How frequently are teens updating their blogs? More than half (57%) of teen bloggers update their blogs once a week or more, and nearly three in ten (29%) update at least three times a week. Drilling down into the data, we find a small, dedicated group of bloggers who update their blogs quite frequently—13% of teens post daily or more often and 16% of blogging teens update about 3 to 5 days a week. Close to another third (28%) say that they update their blogs once or twice a week. Another quarter update their blog every few weeks, and about 18% of teen bloggers post to their site less than that.
Given that the average teen’s blog is not updated particularly frequently, it is not all that surprising that teens do not read blogs routinely, either. About 15% of online teen blog readers say they read once a day or more often. Another 15% say they read blogs 3 to 5 days a week, and 17% say they read 1 or 2 days a week. One in five teens who read blogs say they read them every few weeks and a third report reading them less often. All in all, nearly half of blog-reading teens are reading them less than once a week, and the other half weekly or more often.
A fifth of online teens (22%) report keeping their own webpages, which is similar to the 24% of online teens who reported creating or working on their own webpage in our 2000 survey of teens and parents.6 However, the growth of the overall online teen population means that the number of teens involved with creating or maintaining webpages has grown from about 4 million to about 5 million. Though technically blogs are a type of webpage, webpages generally tend to be more static, with less frequently updated content. Blogs, particularly those created through blog hosting web services, usually use templates to organize and simplify layout designs. Websites typically have more freeform layouts. A slightly larger group of online teens (32%) say that they have created or worked on webpages or blogs for others, including groups they belong to or friends, or for school assignments.
There are some good lessons to take away from this massive gathering of statistical data:
- The next generation of Internet users are likely to create and exponentially increasing amount of content on the web.
_ - This “blog generation” – a term I first heard this week from a 22-yr old – will be using the Internet far more frequently for far more personal tasks than the current web users.
_ - Women and affluence will dominate the content creating demographics.
So, I hope you’re all out there thinking of ways to get 13-17 old female bloggers interested in your sites, because they’re the ones controlling the link and content power of the web. I’m personally planning an SEOmoz guide to using search engine marketing to discretely discover if that boy on the IP address down the street is searching for the naughty pictures you’ve hidden on your MySpace profile (which, according to Wired, recently surpassed Google in page views per month).
