We’ve been banging this drum for a while now, but it’s still always interesting to see new data on who your target audiences can be when using online technologies.
The latest news from OFCOM apparently “turns the established assumptions about web users upside down”. Whilst this probably isn’t true for those who follow these things, the old assumptions about ‘internet = just young people’ still seem to need to be challenged.
First of all, pleasingly, the UK has the most active internet population in europe, which shows that either the initiatives or the market have been working well in this area.
More interestingly though, for the first time women have overtaken men in terms of net usage, in this case in the 25 to 49 age category. Now, the ‘gendering’ of websites is a tricky one, and haven’t seen much research out there about it, but my suspicion would be that websites are prone to gender differences in terms of appeal and usage, so this could lead to some implications for site design and usability that would be interesting to look at.
What may be most interesting of all is that one in six over 65′s use the web, and when they do, their usage far exceeds that of teenagers, spending 42 hour a month online, as opposed to the 25 spent by teenagers.
So, once more with feeling, the web is not just a young person’s thing, it’s not just for geeky men, and not using it is becoming an exclusionary act.
