I can’t believe it either, but the Washington Post suggests that maybe teenagers aren’t a real stable audience. Wow!
Supposedly teenagers are moving to Facebook because they’re sick of MySpace stalkers. The article is based on the opinions of one high school English class, which tells us that teens travel in packs (more shock). I have a few problems with the article:
1. Article relies on too small of a sample.
2. Creeps don’t ruin MySpace, spam ruins MySpace.
3. Things won’t be much better at Facebook.
3a. I still don’t think the two work very well in direct comparison, and I have a whole new round of issues with FB that I’ll discuss later.
4. Article mentions YouTube but not the MySapce downturn effect on YouTube.
5. Failure to cite Josh Amer for all of his insight into this coming problem.
6. 320,000 new profiles a day is still pretty damn good growth.
6a. The real problem is that of those 320,000 many are either one time users or businesses (that use spam and call it viral marketing) not real people.
Best line of the article: She routinely heard from people who complained they weren’t designated as one of her top eight friends. “People would be like, ‘why am I not in your top eight?’ ” – that’s the type of insightful journalism that separates blogs from print.
Sorry this isn’t on schedule - we’ll call it the Sunday Special.
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link
http://jdamer.com/wordpress/2006/10/29/this-just-in-teenagers-lack-attention-span/trackback/
October 30, 2006 at 5:20 am
colbert
milking money from teens ? come on. There’s more money else where. I think they should be spending more money from other business ventures.
October 30, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Josh Amer
I disagree somewhat. I’m not sure of the exact numbers but I would guess that teens make up a fairly large segment of the people that spend large amounts of leisure time on the web. From that standpoint they can be profitable if you use things like standard CPM ads, but not CPC or any ecommerce. It’s an important segment, but more for building future loyalty - I guess it should be part but not all of your strategy, but I’d say the same for other businesses as well.
I think sites like LinkedIn prove that you can’t grow as much if you limit yourself to the professional segment.