The ever-interesting Hitwise blog has a post talking about what 18 to 24 year olds do online.
Yesterday I spoke at the the Millennials Conference in Los Angeles. I talked about some websites that have a high concentration of users in the 18-24 age group, and are enabling users to share content beyond the usual activities on social networking sites. 18-24 year-olds make up 19% of the adult online population, and based upon their website preferences, are much more interested in creating and sharing content than the average online user. [LeeAnn Prescott – Hitwise US: Milliennials – What are 18-24 Year Olds Doing Online?]
The sites mentioned are CarDomain, deviantArt and FanFiction.Net. One of the reasons that HitWise is interesting though is that it goes beyond the anecdotal. These sites are all HitWise category leaders and are showing growth in market share within category. The focus on creative disclosure and sharing is interesting. LeeAnn Prescott, the author of the post, notes:
These sites enable users to create content and communicate about topics that they are passionate about. One of the themes that came up on the panel was that the activities young people engage in are not that much different now than before the current technology explosion, but the tools are different. For artists, writers, and car aficionados, these sites offer a form of expression and facilitate connections that would not have been possible 20 years ago. [LeeAnn Prescott – Hitwise US: Milliennials – What are 18-24 Year Olds Doing Online?]
I had not come across FanFiction.Net before, nor its companion site FictionPress. FictionPress focuses on original works:
FictionPress is a growing network of over half a million writers/readers, and home to over 900,000 original works.
As a writer, this is a place to showcase your creativity and for a reader, FictionPress is an opportunity to feast to your heart’s content. [FictionPress.Com :]
Here is Wikipedia on FanFiction.Net:
FanFiction.Net (often abbreviated as FF.Net or FFN) is an automated fan fiction archive site. It was founded on October 15, 1998 by Los Angeles computer programmer Xing Li, who also runs the site. As of 2005, FanFiction.Net is the largest and most popular fan fiction website in the world, hosting more than one million stories,[citation needed] for literally thousands of fandoms[citation needed] and in over 30 languages. [1] [FanFiction.Net – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. LD – some internal WikiPedia links removed.]
Related entry:
