In January, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a study on young people’s media use entitled Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds. I came across the study thanks to a post by Chas Edwards at Digg who called out some really interesting stats such as:

• Young people are spending more time per day consuming media on a cell phone (49 minutes) than talking on a cell phone (33 minutes)
• Young people are “watching 38 more minutes per day of TV content in 2009 versus 2004, but 25 minutes less (per day) of it is live on an actual TV.”

In addition to these two stats, a few other things really jumped out to me including:

• Over the past decade, the total amount of media an 8-to-18 year-old consumes in a day has jumped 3 hours and 15 minutes to over 10 hours and 45 minutes a day.
• 3 out of 4 young people own an iPod/MP3 Player and 2 out of 3 own a cell phone
• More TV Content is consumed by DVD (12%), Mobile (12%) and Online (9%) than by DVR (8%).  All totaled, only 59% of TV Content is consumed live.
• Time spent playing video games is up 50% in the past 5 years to 1 hour and 13 minutes per day.
• 7 out of 10 young people have a TV in their bedroom.

I point these stats out because in 10 years, today’s young people will be tomorrow’s general market.    These are amazing shifts in the media landscape and something brands need to pay attention to today…whether or not you currently target younger consumers.

If you want to read the whole presentation, you can download the PDF here.

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