Girls Lead Online Activity: Survey
There will be 22 million teens online by 2008, up from 18 million in 2003. Among these, a select group of “teen influencers” will have increasingly more say about household spending.
That’s one finding from JupiterResearch, which surveyed 1,800 teens online for a trio of research reports released earlier this month.
Surprisingly, girls go online at a younger age and are slightly more influential than boys. Girls are more active online at 14 than boys are at 17, per Jupiter. Teen girls spend about 22% more time online than boys-but teen boys spend 150% more time playing games online.
The most active kids (averaging eight hours per week online) account for about 17% of all online teens. These “teen influencers” are popular with peers, style-conscious, and influential with family and friends. They undertake the broadest array of online activities and tend to be older and wealthier than average. Fully 53% of influencers are girls, reports Darien, CT-based Jupiter.
Teens spend an average seven hours a week online versus 10 hours watching TV. Seventy-one percent regularly use instant messaging; 30% use personal pages and Weblogs. Teens go online for games, music and movies more often than adults, but seek less online about sports and TV than adults do.