When Are You a Teen Site?
Posted by anastasia on 02-13-2006I think this is an interesting question for big sites popular with teens to consider. Myspace claims it's not a teen site, but it's probably the number one site with teens right now. Between the tweens lying about their ages and the older teens who make up at least some of the millions of users registered on Myspace, I would argue that they are enough of a teen site to take a more proactive (i.e. public) stance in response to the heat they're getting from the media right now. Instead I read about this item in the MediaPost — "Playboy To Publish Women Of MySpace." I mean could this happen at a worse time for the company? MySpace claims it's not an official partnership, but they are hosting the page where women who want to post can submit photos. I wonder how many of those "women" are 18 or under.
Here is my advice — know when you hit the tipping point that makes you a teen site. When this happens, if you don't want the responsibility that goes along with it, you either raise your age to 18 and enforce it, or spin off a teen section of the site that is more carefully monitored. Why can't there be a MySpace Teen?
Unfortunately the growing number of incidents is slowly forcing them to do what they should have been doing and talking about already: figuring out ways to make the service safer for the teens who are using it.
Also in the news today
February 13th, 2006 at 8:26 am
It's no doubt that buzz about MySpace now is popping up all over the place. I also just read an article in the March issue of Vanity Fair, "Will Success Spoil MySpace?" (by James Verini). Speaking of teens, there was a shocking statistic in there–that only about 25% of their users are under 18. I don't know about you, but I find that very hard to believe. And it brings into question, something that you've brought up, how many teens out there are posing as someone older?
February 13th, 2006 at 9:18 am
Yes — but 25 percent of 54 million users is 13.5 million teens! And I'm sure there are lots of posers, too. It will be interesting to see where Myspace is in a year…