I guess blogs just aren’t cool anymore.
According to a Pew Internet Project report released Wednesday, teens and young adults are blogging less than they used to, while older adults are blogging more.
In 2006, 28% of online teens were blogging, but now that number has been halved to just 14%. Young adults (18-29 year olds) also have been giving up the practice, with only 15% of that demographic maintaining a blog, as opposed to the 24% reported in December 2007. Older adults (30+ year olds) represent the only group to have marked an increase in blogging, from 7% in December 2007 to 11% in 2009.
Pew cites the rising popularity of social networks, especially Facebook, as a viable reason for the dwindling number of young bloggers, hypothesizing that “youth may be exchanging ‘macro-blogging’ for microblogging with status updates.” Though by November 2006 over half (55%) of wired teens had connected to social networks, that number has now increased to 73%. That means nearly three in every four online young Americans maintains a social profile.
The social sites being used by each group also varies.
One is much more likely to find a young user on MySpace and an older user on LinkedIn, but Facebook seems to be in control of some place right in the middle. 66% of young users and 36% of adults maintain profiles on MySpace. On the other hand, 7% of young users and 19% of adults have accounts on LinkedIn. Finally, 71% of young users and 75% of adults own Facebook profiles.
Interestingly, Twitter doesn’t play at all into these figures. Only 8% of teenagers use Twitter.
In its report, Pew also found that among younger users laptops have gradually replaced desktops as the computing device of choice and mobile phones are “ubiquitous.” Internet use, too, is expected amongst younger users.
