In my unofficial wonderings around the Web, I've noticed, and research confirms, that online social sites like MySpace are experiencing their demographic growing older. From a business point-of-view, this should be great news, as long as they are replaced in numbers enough to make it not matter.
One MySpace user said: "I think it's definitely going down - a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now."
An interesting thing about Facebook is that their audience may get younger for awhile, with their opening up their service to everyone.
In reference to teen online community sites in general, there probably really isn't such a thing. Here's what happens: Teens find a place 
online to hang out, once it gets enough traffic going to it, buzz starts to make the site more known to others out there. They come in and take a look, and start using the service themselves; usually someone much older. Teens then see that they no longer "own it" and go on to something and somewhere else.
Now here's what's great for the online owners: The older crowd that now frequents the space, is much more apt to stay around a lot longer and will be much less inclined to look all over the place for another place to hang out.
In other words, they're more predictable, and are a much better foundation to build your business model on. Don't think that his isn't missed by News Corp. (NWS) or Rupert Murdoch in reference to MySpace.
The bottom line as a marketer is that a strategy that could be used is to create interesting sites that younger users i.e. early adapters, find compelling. Once they make it their hangout, others will eventually hear about it and follow. Those that follow will be older visitors; those your business can rely and be built upon.
I think you're going to see this pattern across all general social-networking sites as they become more popular among the online population. The major thing to keep in mind is when I say "general" sites. There are some sites that are so niche, that no one but a teen would possibly be interested in being there. That's different than what I'm talking about here.
Great article. I agree that "older" users tend to stay around longer and search for new social networking sites less often, however, these users also tend to spend much less time on those sites. Whereas the younger generation may spend hours at a time on myspace.. the older generation may use it more as a networking site or purely to stay in contact with old friends.
Posted by: Lyndsey | October 30, 2006 10:27 AM | Permalink to Comment