Aussie Teens online habits

Teenagers spent an average of 14 hours and 42 minutes online during December 2013, compared to the 40 hours and 21 minutes by adults.

55% of online teenagers performed four or more activities online, compared with 79% of adults.

Entertainment is the top activity teenagers engage in online, followed by communication then research. Teenagers use any device to get their online fix, with roughly equal distribution across PCs, smartphones and tablets.

With commercial radio streaming turned off in regional Australia due to a copyright dispute with PPCA, country teens no longer have the chance to consume local radio entertainment from their local commercial radio station.

The top 5 surfing destinations for teenagers are search engines and aggregators, a potential problem for broadcasters and news organisations in the long term.

Aggregators generally don’t create content themselves, they make money by indexing and displaying other people’s content, while the content makers often do not get the same kind of revenue that the aggregators get. Since aggregators do not have the productions costs of broadcasters and news organisations, their profit margin is usually higher than the organisations that actually create the content.

While broadcasters want the traffic that results from search to increase their web hits, there is a growing body of evidence in other studies, elsewhere in the world, that shows that teenagers are developing the habit of skimming news stories on sites such as Reddit, Pinterest, etc, but not ever clicking through to the original story on the creator’s website. The ACMA study showed which social media channels are being used most by teens in Australia.

For the full infographic, click here. Read the full report here.

Tags: | | |