Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Read the rest of the Times article HERE, and a nice compliment to that piece HERE.
You can spin the data to mean whatever you want, but we should all be able to agree these numbers send a very different message to advertisers who think they must only be chasing the almighty 'youth'. When is someone from a TV network or movie studio or website development company going to go on the record and announce they are targeting an older, 'adult' demographic...and it's okay?!
When it comes to Twitter I enjoy the information gained determined by whom I'm following, but I'm still not comfortable with tweeting yet. I really don't want to become this 'on the patio' guy:
But I'll happily make a TV show for him!
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