Blog
Some blogging about blogging
Lately there has been quite a lot of talk about blogs being "so last year" in several
different places around the Internet. However, this is not the case in Finland. In
IRC-Galleria, the most active social
networking site in the Nordic countries, blogging has grown significantly during the last six
months. Currently the users of the site post on their blogs over a million times in total every
month!
In the beginning of summer 2008 a new feature was introduced in
IRC-Galleria: now the users can tag their
blog entries to be a part of one of the over half a million communities on the site. While this may
sound like a rather simple thing, it is in fact quite revolutionary. In the long run, the blog
tagging feature will make every community on the site an information resource created by the users.
And since there's a community regarding practically every subject you can imagine, this is
something that really doesn't exist in any other social networking site.
Top 5 subjects during the first month of blog tagging:
1. Midsummer
2. Love
3. Festivals
4. The European Soccer Championship
5. Humour
Habbo Teen Survey Reveals Television is still a Hit With Teens
The Global Habbo Youth Survey has
delivered us an extensive amount of intriguing insights into the lives of teenagers today – as you
may have learned from our earlier blog posts dealing with the various topics of the survey. This is
the fourth peek we provide to the findings, in the previous ones we have covered teenager’s
mobile
usage habits, shared views on youth’s number one interest area
music,
and explained their
game
console preferences across different countries. This last one is about teenagers’ media
consumption habits.
Our global survey revealed that TV consumption maintains its relevance amongst teens.
However, Internet is still the number one media to nearly all of the respondents.
For the study, Habbo surveyed 58,486 teens between the ages 11 and 18 from 31 countries. The
results show that 75 percent of all respondents say TV is an important medium for them – six
percentage points up on from the 2006 study. Interestingly, the importance of magazines and
radio drops two and six percentage points to 49 percent and 41 percent respectively.
Newspapers stay static with 37 percent of teens claiming their importance. The relevance of TV is
especially high in the Latin American, Southern European and Asian countries where over 80 percent
of respondents say it’s important to them.
When looking at the most popular TV content, teen tastes are very similar all over the
world. Amongst both boys and girls the overall favourite TV show is
The Simpsons, which was also the clear
favourite in 2006. Globally, cartoons and animes such as
Family Guy,
South Park and
Naruto are more popular among boys, whereas
girls enjoy watching sitcoms and drama series like
Hannah Montana,
Friends and
Desperate Housewives.
When looking at the gender differences the survey reveals that girls read more magazines
whereas boys are slightly more interested in reading newspapers. The findings also imply that
newspaper publishers may be heading for difficulties in the future, unless they find more ways to
connect with the young Internet generation. Overall, respondents viewed newspapers as the least
important medium with 25 percent stating them to be not important at all.
Considering that teen media usage is dominated by having access to desirable content when
and where they want it, it was surprising to see that TV is still considered so important for
teens, and in many countries it’s on the rise. This is expected because a lot of quality content is
still generated for television and digital video recorders such as
TiVo and
Sky+ allow teens to fit the programmes they want
to watch into their busy schedules.
It’s clear from the survey that the way teens consume media shouldn’t be taken for granted
and there are no hard and fast rules aside from perhaps that teens appear to value on demand
services. Although Internet still remains the most important medium, it is also used as a channel
to access content from TV and other more traditional media. However, the survey results reveal
teens still greatly appreciate their TV screen and it should not be ignored when trying to connect
with them.
A report of the Global Habbo Youth Survey 2008 is available to buy as a hard copy book of
250 pages. For inquiries and orders, please visit the
Sulake Webstore.
Check also the announcement
press release.
About the research
The research was conducted within the virtual world, Habbo, and the total amount of
respondents (after data cleaning) was 58, 486. The research was conducted between October and
November 2007. 31 countries were surveyed and statistical weighting was employed to give all
participating countries an equal weight in the global results. Research is available on request.
Teen audience won over by PlayStation according to Habbo’s Global Youth Survey
To us at Sulake the
recent news about
Sony’s PS3 console overtaking Microsoft’s Xbox in European sales did not come as a surprise.
According to our recent Habbo Global Youth Survey, PS3 was clearly more popular that Xbox in most
of the countries studied.
58,486 teens between the ages of 11 and 18 took part in the global survey across 31 markets.
From the respondents, 69 percent refer to the PS3 console as “great” or “good”. This was
followed closely by the Nintendo Wii at 64 percent and Xbox 360 with 58 percent.
The PS3 beats Wii in every age group except the 11 to 12 year olds. However, the Wii is more
popular amongst girls up to 16 year olds, and is the favoured female choice overall. The
results also show that whilst the Xbox 360 is less popular in Europe and Asia, its popularity in
the Americas fares much better: it is the most popular console in Mexico and Colombia and takes
second place in the US, Canada, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.
The results of this survey are interesting as it gives us an insight into which brands these
teens aspire to as the level of ownership does not correspond to the consoles’ popularity. By order
of ownership, the Wii leads, followed by the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Of the teens surveyed, 24 percent own a Wii, with 21 percent and 23 percent owning a PS3 and
Xbox 360 respectively. The results do suggest significant growth potential, with each of these
consoles there is another 20% planning on buying one of these consoles in the next 12 months.
The Wii and PS3 have the most sales potential: the amount of respondents that are interested in
buying them is 4 to 5 percentage points higher than for the Xbox 360.
As Sony and Xbox strive to broaden their console’s appeal, from hardcore to casual gamer,
the results of the survey seem to indicate that gender, not previous gaming experience, determines
console choice. Regardless of their level of interest towards gaming boys prefer the PS3 and
girls prefer the Wii.
A report of the Global Habbo Youth Survey 2008 is available to buy as a hard copy book of
250 pages. For more information and orders, please go to the
Sulake webstore.