It continually surprises me how far behind some of the Internet writers are on the demographic changes on the Web.
For example, just yesterday I found articles written or posted on blogs citing MySpace and Facebook as social networking hangouts for primarily young people, when the average user of MySpace is over 35 and Facebook is increasingly aging in its average user.
The same is now happening in the online video consumption market. It's been studied and revealed for some time here that those consuming video are similar to the demographic in the large social networking sites. In other words they're averaging over 35 years of age as well, says a survey by Advertising.com and InsightExpress.
How much of the over-35 crowd watch online video? A full 69 percent. How about those in the 18-34 age group? Amazingly, the survey says only 31 percent view streaming video.
Not surprisingly, the preferred content of video viewers is news, standing at 62 percent of video viewed. Other desired online video was movie trailers at 38 percent and music videos at 36 percent. TV shows were the fourth most-watched online video, with 33 percent watching that, while user-generated content was watched by 29 percent.
The much-hyped user-generated content grew, but not in proportion to the media coverage it generates. It grew by less than 10 percent over last years' 21 percent.
People are quoting, whether ignorantly or willingly, statistics that were in place a couple years ago.
This is important of course because building campaigns around old statistics is a disaster. The early adopters on these various platforms were young people to begin with, as news spread about that, older people starting discovering the social networks and video sites and have responded by being the largest users.
To market as if we were still at the demographics we were two years ago would be poor business. If you read about young people flocking to these social networking or video streaming sites, keep in mind they're probably averaging over the age of 35.
Having said that, we do need to be aware of niche video and social networking sites that could alter these statistics.
But when it comes to general information and video sites, you're going to have an older average demographic. You can count on it.
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