Net Catches Them Young

The netizen population is getting younger by the day. In fact, young surfers in the age group of 12 to 22 already form the largest segment visiting cyberspace and access the Net more often (nine times a week) than businessmen (seven times on weekdays). Sample more: almost all young surfers visit Jobsahead.com and Naukri.com; 53 per cent use the net to collect educational material and have voted Yahoo! and Rediff as the two overall favourite sites, according to a netmonitor/ORG-MARG survey. It is the job sites and the cricket sites that appear to have a really loyal following among young visitors. On a scale of one to three (one corresponds to "not at all likely to revisit the site" and three to "very likely to revisit the site") Jobsahead.com and Naukri.com received the perfect score of "three". Thatscricket.com(3) and Cricket.org (2.87) were the other sites with very high scores. These were followed by Hotmail (2.85) and Yahoo (2.82). For music, the new generation prefers MTV. For films, its Filmfare, for greetings Blue Mountain, for games indiagames and for news indiatimes. The survey was conducted among young Internet users drawn from among 24,848 individuals belonging to the upper socio-economic group in eight metros during June 2000. The Internet is used by the young mostly for communication, be it e-mail, chatting or instant messaging. Almost all Internet using youth use e-mail on an average between three to four times a week. The survey reveals that 40 per cent send and receive e-mail every day and another 25 per cent every alternate day. Chatting is another great pastime on the Net with 75 per cent of the youth having chatted at least once in the last one month. On an average, they spend two hours every week chatting and each chat session is almost one-hour long. Instant messaging is slow in catching on, with only about one out of three young netizens aware of these services, and one out of five using them. About 52 per cent use the Net to send greetings. Online gaming is not as hot as one might expect with young Internet surfers, with only 36 per cent of them playing online games; these netizens too, on an average, play these games only about twice a week. With only another 18 per cent downloading games from the Net, the survey suggests that more than half of the young netizens do not use the Net for any games-related surfing. According to the survey, only 34 per cent download music from the Net. and film music was the most popular download (52 per cent), followed by rock and pop music (35 per cent).