|
Title: Girls are most prolific web users Post by: Graham on March 09, 2008, 12:39:34 PM So says an interesting article in today's Sunday Times:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3511863.ece Quote New research suggests it is time to rethink the stereotypical net user as a pasty-faced male geek in Joe 90 specs, or the furtive spotty teen looking for zeppelin breasts online. The most prolific net users are now girls and young women. A recent study by the Pew Internet Project in America on teens in social media found that blogging growth among teenagers is almost entirely fuelled by girls, whom it describe as a new breed of “super-communicators”. Some 35% of girls, compared with 20% of boys, have blogs; 32% of girls have their own websites, against 22% of boys. Girls have embraced social networking sites on a massive scale, with 70% of American girls aged 15-17 having built and regularly worked on a profile page on websites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, as opposed to 57% of boys of the same age. John Horrigan of the Pew Internet Project says these figures are likely to be echoed throughout the West. “The internet is a very expressive medium and you’re looking at times in a girl’s life when they are very socially expressive; the internet, and social networking particularly, enables that need,” he said. Figures from the UK back up Horrigan’s hunch. A survey done by Hitwise, an internet research company, in January found that almost 55% of all British users of social networking websites were women. Similar research by Nielsen Online shows that women aged 18-24 account for 17% of all users of the social sites, while men in the same age group account for 12%. |