December 2008: Targeting Kids and Teens

Industry Stats & Data by eMarketer

eMarketer is "The First Place to Look" for research and analysis on digital marketing and media. eMarketer aggregates and analyzes research from over 2,800 sources, and brings it together in analyst reports, daily articles and the "eStat Database" the most comprehensive database of online marketing statistics in the world.

Children and teens in the US go online in significant numbers: 82% of teens ages 12 to 17 and 43.5% of children ages 3 to 11 will use the Internet on a monthly basis in 2009, according to eMarketer estimates. At the same time, close to two-thirds of teens and nearly one-half of tweens own a mobile phone, according to market researchers.

In 2008, according to eMarketer estimates, there are 35.8 million child and teen Internet users in the US. eMarketer defines a child Internet user as someone between the ages of 3 and 11 who goes online once a month, while a teen Internet user is someone between the ages of 12 and 17 who goes online once a month.

Teens continue to lead nearly all other demographic groups in Internet usage—more than 80% will go online at least once a month in 2009. Moreover, children are going online at a younger age. They spend an increasing amount of time online, and they have become quite sophisticated about how to navigate the Web.

Overall, children and teens make up 18.6% of the total US Internet user population.

While children and teens use the Internet and mobile phone for a variety of activities and entertainment, it is their use of these devices for communication that is most compelling. Many kids start out using e-mail because that is what their Generation X parents are most familiar with, but they quickly gravitate toward text and instant messaging, social networks and virtual worlds as ways to interact.

Young people want their communications to be fluid—if they write something online they want to have the option to also send it out to their friends’ mobile devices. They want to get social network status updates online and on their phone, in real time.

Their communications devices are important to how they interact with the world around them. As the Pew Internet & American Life Project put it in an April 2008 report: “The act of exchanging emails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.”

Data from Nielsen Online indicates that about 19% of active Internet users in July 2008—or 32.4 million people—were children under age 18.

Marketers and media companies looking to reach children and teens need to know that “online,” “offline” and “mobile” are terms that will soon become irrelevant. The children and teens of today and tomorrow will not go “online” to do something. Instead, they will just do it—communicate, get information, shop, buy, be entertained—and revolutionize the process every step of the way.

This audience navigates between a multitude of electronic options for communication, including social networks, text messaging, instant messaging and virtual worlds. As a result, they will expect the transitions between communications media to be seamless; that is, messages sent by one means should be accessible in another.

Bottom line for all marketers—not just kid and teen marketers—is that these revolutionaries are not only changing the way they communicate with each other. They are also changing the ways companies communicate with them.

Find out more about eMarketer's digital marketing and the new report, "Kids and Teens: Communication Revolutionaries"

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