Over the weekend I had a chance to catch up on some of the recent eMarketer reports.  They have been releasing quite a bit around Teens / Tweens and technology.  In particular, their Kids & Teens Communication Revolutionaries provides some stellar information for any Brand Manager marketing to the youth market.  For instance, by 2012 US youth will be almost 1 out of 5 Internet users.

Furthermore, this generation wants to communicate in different ways than older generations, with a much higher preference text messaging than e-mail.

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One of the first posts I ever wrote on Hard Knox Life was about a talk I was giving at the 2008 IEG Sponsorship Conference on “Youth isn’t a demographic, it’s a mindset.“  Well it turns out that IEG took that talk and turned into a cover story for their 8/25 issue of the IEG Sponsorship Report.  You can check it out on Scribd.com

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If someone asked you the #1 website for teens, my guess would be that you’d answer one of the top social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.  Same goes for the twenty-something set.  Well if so, the most recent TRU Study would have proved you wrong.  I was pretty surprised to see YouTube #1 with 8 of 10 Teens visiting in the last 30 days…beating out both MySpace at #4 (56%) and Facebook at #7 (42%).  A few other things that caught my eye:

• 50% of Teens and 56% of Twenty-somethings visited Wikipedia in the past 30 days.  I think that answers the question of what Geny Y views as “credible” information.
• eBay makes the top 6 on both lists and is the #1 “commerce” site for Gen Y.
• Yahoo is #3 on both lists.  They have been getting slammed recently and basically discounted as irrelevant by some in the press.  My guess would be the high ranking of Yahoo is thanks to their Web 2.0 plays like Flickr, Del.ico.us and MyBlogLog…not their base portal or search (except maybe Yahoo Mail).

TRU July 2008 Most Visited Websites