The Presence of Kids Online

According to a recent report released by Nielsen, the active online universe included 16 million children between the ages of 2 to 11 in May, which accounts for 9.5 percent of the total.

The gender split is almost even, with 7.9 million females and 8.0 million males. This age group has grown 18 percent since 2004, when the total online population of kids between the ages of 2 and 11 was approximately 13.6 million.

This compares with growth of 10 percent for the total active Internet universe, and shows that the growth of children online is faster than the growth of the child population in the U.S., where those under 14 are expected to increase by just 1 percent from 2004 to 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

These children are also spending far more time online, or 63 percent more time, in the past five years. In May 2004, this age group spent almost 7 hours online, and in May 2009 they spent more than 11 hours online.

Males spent 7 percent more time online than their female counterparts, while females watched 9 percent more Web pages in May 2009.

Nielsen also notes that 26.3 percent of adults who were online in summer 2009, or 38.2 million of them, have children who are 11 years old or younger, a 7 percent increase from summer of 2008.

Online adults who have children under the age of 12 in their households were 1.7 times more likely to purchase a digital camcorder and 1.5 times more likely to buy groceries online than the average online adult.

Among the 2 to 11 year-old age group, males accounted for 61 percent of video streams and 57 percent of the time spent watching videos online. Specifically, males in this age group streamed 355.6 million videos, compared to 224.2 million for females.

With regards to toys, almost 48 percent of videos viewers on the Pokemon Web brand were males between the ages of 2 to 11, as 38 percent of video viewers on the Barbie Web brand were females in that age group.

Besides the toys, it will be important to monitor how, if at all, these trends in young children hold as they mature and become adults.

Source:

http://www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090706.pdf