Posted on October 6, 2006
New Generation Embracing Social Networking
BY BEN CASTELLI
The power of Social Media continues to grow as less people go to the computer for information or to interact with their computer, but to interact with other people. It appears social networking's growth into the mainstream is attracting an increasingly older audience. CNET News recently reported on a new comScore report which reveals that over 51% of U.S. based visitors to MySpace in August were aged 35 or older. Compare that to a year ago when only 39% were aged 35 or older. ComScore attributed some of the increase to the explosion of online video and the fact that MySpace is now serving up more video than YouTube. A few other interesting statistics from the report were that visitors to MySpace aged 12 to 17 dropped from nearly 25 percent last year to about 12 percent in August. The percentage aged 18 to 24 has decreased only slightly, from 19.6 percent last year to just more than 18 percent this year. The total number of unique visitors to MySpace has more than doubled over the past year to more than 55.8 million.
MySpace has always been a great place to find young influencers and marketers have definitely taken note. The research now shows the potential for reaching a wider age demographic and also helps to address advertising concerns that MySpace would only ever be popular with the younger generation. Google certainly sees the potential and in August secured a deal that gave them exclusive rights to provide Web search results and sponsored links across MySpace. This move gives Google an important source of traffic and ad revenue since each members MySpace page will contain a Google search box. Also, ads will appear both in search results and contextually targeted placements on MySpace pages.
Social networking is becoming more than one-generational and will continue to appeal to a wider range of visitors due to the simple fact that humans are social animals and social media helps fulfill that basic desire to interact with others.
