My Open Kimono

YOU CAN'T "HOLD MY HAND" ONLINE

In the mid-sixties it was the Beatles that drove teens wild. What are the most popular raves for teens today? It’s not MySpace and it’s not YouTube or even Google.


According to a recent Nielsen Report (June 2007) US teen’s online preferences are moving away from instant messaging and towards sites offering social networking tools, music lyrics and photo sharing.
The lesser known sites are unique in that the teen composition of their audience is three times that of the larger social networking sites – although their penetration of the audience is much smaller.

Sites ranking in the top ten include:

CreateBlog.com: Takes the number one slot as a community driven one stop resource website for Myspace, Xanga, Blogger, Livejournal, MoveableType, Wordpress and more, where you can find Myspace layouts, Xanga layouts, avatars and icons.

PLyrics.com: Reflecting the favored music taste of online teens, this database of punk and punk-derived song lyrics is the number six most popular site among teens right now. Posting song lyrics on profiles and as comments is a common activity among social networking teens.

WhateverLife.com: The number five most popular site among teens is actually a blog operated by a single 16-year-old girl. Seen as the authority on MySpace page customization, WhateverLife offers all the codes, tools, layouts, links and detailed step-by-step tutorials for users to personalize their profile pages.

While these sites are all the rage with teens-in-the-know today, be forewarned that the audience is fickle and can make or break a site overnight. But for the moment, they are the sites that readily resonate with the teen audience. Because these sites reach a relatively small number of teens, they are the perfect testing ground for creative concepts in a highly focused environment.

If your objective is to reach a broad number of teens, then a best bet is Photobucket.com. Although lower on the composition measure, it reaches about twenty-five percent of the audience on a monthly basis with staying power.