A lot of research over recent years has asked the question: ‘how much are young people on the internet compared to watching the television?’ While the distinction may not be as meaningful as it once was (with the rise of on-demand services) it’s still rather an incredible fact that the average young person is online for about 20 hours a week, but only watching that old dinosaur, the Telesaurus-Box (sorry!) for about 5 hours. But we can also do a more direct comparison, and report that they watch TV content via computer for an average of 3.5 hours a week.

Even more incredible is that some 30% of 19-25 year-olds are spending a whopping 28 hours online every week. One third of those online have sessions of 90 minutes. That figure can increase with age, with 20% of 22-25 year-olds having sessions of 3 hours in length.

Yes, ‘online’ covers a variety of sins, but for advertisers keen to know where young people are spending their time, it’s hard to deny the compelling prospect that half of young people are spending 20 hours a week surfing. As mentioned in an earlier post there are inroads being made to see what young people actually feel while they are surfing the web, a subject much harder to quantify than how much time they spend online or reading online.

Youth News Reading Habits: Online Overtakes Print

With the ongoing decline of traditional media, it seems a story about another newspaper or magazine closing is never more than a few weeks away. Even so-called ‘freesheets’, which were never designed to be paid for by their customers are folding. Young people like reading online. Given a straight forward economic explanation, print should have disappeared already; why pay for something you can get for free, that’s constantly updated? But in reality this is more complicated than economics. Print has a different feel to reading from a screen. Furthermore, switching from screen to print in the average working professional’s day may also symbolically mark a transition from work to leisure. But young people don’t seem to see this distinction and appear to operate based on pure convenience and cost.

Looking at our figures reveals that 19-25 year-olds read print for an average of 25 minutes. But they read news on their computers for an average of 28 minutes. And if you include online via mobile in that – which they read for an average of 15 minutes – we see that online has really overtaken traditional print by some margin. There will always be occasions where young people (indeed everyone) will want hard copy, but most of the time the electronic form suffices.

We will be revisting the subject of youth interacting with print media and their reading and writing habits in one of our regular features next week, so stay tuned!