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.