“im ddeleting the internet [sic]“: A telling re-blog from a teenaged girl on the blogging platform turned social networking site Tumblr, in a chain of re-postings that had her pondering Tumblr’s impact on her life twenty years from now, when her passing, immature thoughts become fodder for a discussion among her boss and colleagues at some imagined future workplace.

The fact that Tumblr speaks to this younger demographic, and in particular teenage girls slightly more so than boys, is known. Why that is the case is something which many are still scratching their heads over, even as Tumblr begins to focus on generating revenue from this very audience, whose online behavior makes it tricky for advertisers who want to connect.

“How do teenagers waste hours upon hours consuming Tumblr?“, a confused parent once asked on another time-wasting site, the Q&A resource known as Quora. The top answer, posted by “Anonymous,” claims to be from a teenaged user of Tumblr, though it could just as easily be a sneaky marketing ploy from the startup itself. But it speaks some truths nonetheless.

Tumblr, wrote the poster, “seems like a freedom, as weird as that may sound.”

“Unlike Facebook, I have a clean slate,” this person explained. ”I really have found myself starting to have my own opinions. These, in some cases, greatly differ from relatives or friends, people who used to greatly influence my opinions.”

Whether or not “anon” was a real Tumblr user, or even a real teenager, it’s an apt enough explanation as to why the site has found footing among the young and hormonal. Though worries that a boss might peruse online indiscretions may one day come to pass, Tumblr users often use pseudonyms or only first names, making their blogs harder to find by the prying eyes of parents or HR, for that matter.

Tumblr doesn’t owe its success among teens solely because of its pseudonymous qualities. That helps, but, more simply, it has become the digital upgrade to that demographic’s earlier tools for cut-and-pasted self-discovery: the repurposing of media and content to reflect their interests and fandoms, likes and hates, newly forming opinions, and more.

Read through teenaged Tumblrdom as a grown-up, and you’ll soon feel very, very old.

“i haven’t had my phone on ring for like 3 years,” muses ”Aubrey,” who also once reblogged “what the frick is friendster.”

Don’t worry, Aubrey, you don’t need to know.

~~~~

The real answer to the surging teenaged use of the site lies not in the lengthy Quora explanations, but in the examples of the odd, offbeat, and yes, sometimes inappropriate content kids are sharing.

Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter. If anything, these teenaged Tumblrs harken back to earlier web days where users built their own pages on AngelFire and Geocities, with atrocious backgrounds, upgraded cursors, and dancing GIF images galore. GIFs, in fact, are so hugely popular on Tumblr that the company even began experimenting with GIF-based ads.

The teen blogs are also reminiscent of MySpace, featuring often same general gaudiness, and the spewing of content on top of content, like the layers of photos and other decorations teens used to tack up on cork bulletin boards and bedroom walls.

Tumblr now serves that purpose, and more.

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At the risk of dating myself, I’ll reveal that I was teenaged in the pre-Web era. We didn’t have Tumblr then, but rather composition notebooks, glossy magazines, and scissors. We had mean girl-like cliques to rebel against, passions, complaints, and in-jokes. We liked boys. We worried about our looks and clothing and hairstyles. We dissed our teachers and our parents. We wrote short stories. And we expressed ourselves on paper with scrapbooks, torn magazine collages, and shared notes in passed around “slam books.” (To be fair, we weren’t writing truly awful things, really – that’s just what these books were called.)

Now children have the Internet. And Tumblr has become their platform for those universal, familiar urges at self-expression falling somewhere in between the diary, the slam book and the cork board. Notes on Tumblr blogs range from mundane (“ive been telling myself ill start my homework soon for the last 4 hours,”) to the confessional (“a cute necklace for school tomorrow” which accompanies a picture of a noose – a note whose message would terrify parents and other adults, but appears to only be commentary on the horrors of high school life).

~~~~

According to Pew Internet’s study from earlier this year, 13 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr, while only 5 percent of those 30-49 do, 3 percent of those 50-64, and a (surprising) 1 percent of those 65 and older do.

Demographic data from Quantcast further drives home just how youthful a site Tumblr has become. 21 percent of its audience is under 18, 30 percent is 18 to 24, and 22 percent is 25 to 34. Then the numbers taper off. Site users don’t tend to have kids of their own, make somewhere between $0 and $50,000 (66 percent do), have either no college (41 percent) or college backgrounds (48 percent), and tend to reflect an ethnically diverse makeup, where there are more non-white users. (Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans, and “other” all beat out the Caucasian segment.)

Now Tumblr is seriously looking to monetize this audience, proffering a platform for brand advertising which CEO David Karp last week explained is meant to be a place for advertisers to “build amazing, interactive ads.”

“We have a story that really, truly stands apart from the other big networks right now,” he said. Other networks are harnessing user intent, then pointing users to little blue links. “Creative brand advertising has had nowhere to live on the web,” he said. Ten out of the ten top Hollywood studios advertise on Tumblr now, Karp also noted, while speaking, too, of ads that inspire people to go out and purchase, designed by imaginative types who went into advertising because of their “Mad Men-like aspirations.”

He may have played down the demographics’ role in Tumblr’s advertising equation during this discussion, but the site’s teen audience is too powerful to ignore: there are some 30 million U.S. teens with over $200 billion in buying power. They might not all be on Tumblr, of course, but if brands can reach a portion of this group, they have the potential to tap into a non-trivial source of disposable income from heavy-duty consumers. After all, the U.S. is Tumblr’s top traffic source.

Tumblr’s future, for now, seems to be closely tied to its young adult demographic, their whims, and perhaps even their historical aversion to online ads. This audience has grown up connected, is often skeptical and cynical when it comes to brand advertising, and tends to toe a fine line between wanting to express their individuality and wanting to fit in.

It’s not an easy group to reach, which makes Tumblr’s revenue potential tricky to pin down. Too much or the wrong kind of advertising, and a fickle teen audience may find a new home elsewhere. Though Tumblr is now home to over 100 million blogs, if a good chunk belong to teens, it’s difficult to count that as serious traction –  today’s teens are less committed to their digital creations than adults, having already invented methods like “whitewalling” and “super-logoff” to erase and hide their Facebook pages, and are now turning to “ephemeral” messaging apps like Snapchat, which delete their communications upon viewing.

They understand just how easy it is to deactivate an account, walk away and begin again. Content is disposable, and the web is an impermanent platform to build upon, they’ve found. These are decidedly radical views.

For Tumblr, the shiftiness of the very group it has found a home among is one of the riskier aspects of what appears to otherwise be a strong, fast-growing and potentially very valuable service. Its revenue plan is to provide a blank slate to its users and advertisers alike (“…we want to give [advertisers] the space to do anything – a four-second loop, an hour and a half video, a high-res panorama,” Karp explained last week.).

But Tumblr will need to be careful with the results of those advertisers’ efforts. Overdone marketing messages could sour Tumblr’s most engaged users on their online hangout. Done well, however, Tumblr could endear itself to its reblog-happy user base even more, connecting aspirational imagery and content with those who are still young enough to dream they can spend their way into new feelings. Whether they’ll eventually end up “ddeleting” those feelings or not.

(Image credit, top: kootation.com; edited version)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is taking a step today in its bid to position itself as the privacy-respecting social network: it is announcing an alliance with the U.S.’s National Association of Attorneys General to provide teens and their parents more information and tools to manage their profiles on Facebook and beyond to counter its less flattering image as a “ever-expanding data collection octopus.”

So far, Facebook has linked up with attorneys general in 19 states to put out “state-specific public service announcements,” starting this Tuesday, which will also include a safety video and a privacy tip sheet. These will be distributed on Facebook’s own safety page, as well on the AGs’ Facebook Pages and their own websites.

It’s important for Facebook to demonstrate that it’s coming out in front on issues like privacy and child protection online. The social network — which by its definition celebrates sharing information with others — often gets scrutinized for how it pushes the boundaries of privacy. Showing that it’s willing to make it as easy as possible for people — and specifically more vulnerable young people — to control their data could help mitigate regulators making those moves on Facebook’s behalf.

Kickstarted by the Maryland attorney general and NAAG president Douglas F. Gansler, and announced by him today during the NAAG’s Privacy in the Digital Age conference, it’s a mark of where Facebook places this in terms of priorities that COO Sheryl Sandberg is getting behind the alliance.

“At Facebook, we work hard to make sure people understand how to control their information and stay safe online. We’re always looking for new partners in that endeavor – that’s why we’re thrilled to collaborate with the National Association of Attorneys General,” said Sandberg in a NAAG statement. It looks like the idea is to bring other state attorneys general on board, too. “We’re grateful for Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler’s leadership on this issue, and we look forward to working with him and attorneys general around the country.”

Privacy, specifically that of younger users, is an increasingly more important point as Facebook continues to add more sophisticated features and services to its platform, making it potentially more challenging for people to control how and where their profiles and information get used. Facebook Home, the new Android launcher, is an example of how Facebook sees a future for very persistent, always-present applications.

But just because Facebook is taking decisive steps does not mean that regulators and others are looking any less closely in what the social network does and how users are faring on it.

“We hope this campaign will encourage consumers to closely manage their privacy and these tools and tips will help provide a safer online experience. Of course, attorneys general will continue to actively protect consumers’ online privacy as well,” said Gansler in the NAAG statement.

Indeed, the wider scope of the conference currently underway is to take steps to update laws to be closer in line with how people share information in an always-online world. “State laws need to be updated to reflect our modern era in which the very nature of privacy and personal information is changing,” he added. “Attorneys general
have before us an extraordinary opportunity to reorient our enforcement and advocacy efforts toward the unique privacy challenges posed by the digital economy.”

And there are also other groups that continue to apply pressure on both government officials and Facebook on the issue of privacy. One, the Center for Digital Democracy, has already come out criticising today’s news.

“Maryland AG Doug Gansler appears to be more interested friending Mark Zuckerberg than working to protect teen privacy on Facebook,” Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, wrote TechCrunch in an email. “Facebook’s practices regarding teens, especially its data collection and ad targeting, require an investigation–not just some glossy educational videos and tip sheets. As president of the National Association of Attorneys General, Mr. Gansler should be working to really protect privacy on Facebook — instead of a PR effort designed to further his political career. Facebook is a complex and deliberately ever-expanding data collection octopus. Young people are the subject of powerful Facebook marketing campaigns pushing junk food and other questionable practices. Gansler’s feel good effort fails to deliver what parents, teens and other Facebook users require: strong privacy safeguards giving them real control over their data.”

This is not the first step that Facebook has made to help younger users better manage their privacy. In February, just after launching its new, dynamic search engine called Graph Search, Facebook followed up with a note on how it affect teens. Specifically, Facebook limits results in Graph Searches made by teens to other results from those aged or aimed at 13-17 year-olds, following on from its existing limitations for teens:

“On Facebook, many things teens are likely to do – such as adding information to their timelines or sharing status updates – can only be shared with a maximum of Friends of Friends,” Facebook noted at the time. “In addition, for certain searches that could help to identify a young person by age or by their location, results will only show to that person’s Friends, or Friends of Friends who are also between the age of 13-17.”

In addition to efforts to give people a better grip on their privacy, Facebook has also tried to illuminate more of the dynamics about how parents and their kids interact on Facebook.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Video chat is still something many people don’t feel comfortable with. For U.S. teens, however, it is quickly becoming a pretty routine way of communicating with each other. According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 37% of teens now regularly use Skype, Apple’s iChat and startups like Tinychat to video chat with each other.

There are significant differences between how many boys and girls use video chat, though. Only a third of boys use video chat while 42% of girls said they have video chatted. Maybe unsurprisingly, those teens who use the Internet more frequently also use video chats more often than their peers who only go online a few times per week. The same is true for teens who text and use social media more often than their peers.

The Pew study also looked at how often kids upload video to the web. A quarter of the U.S. teens who were interviewed for this study also said that they record and upload video to the web. This represents a 100% increase since 2006. Just 14% of adults, by the way, upload video to YouTube and similar services.

Despite the gender gap in video chatting, though, boys and girls are equally likely to upload video these days. That’s quite a change from 2006, when Pew last asked this question. At that time, boys were twice as likely to say that they regularly uploaded video they had taken.

Streaming video over the web, however, still remains a bit of a niche activity among teens. Only 13% of respondents said they stream video live online. Interestingly, 3% of teens with dial-up connections manage to stream video to the web – one postage stamp-sized picture at a time.

The Pew study also noted that 95% of the 799 teens it interviewed said that they use the Internet. This number has not changed over the last few years. It’s worth noting – and somewhat odd – that this data is based on interviews that were conducted between April 19 and July 14, 2011. Given how quickly these trends change, chances are these numbers are actually a bit higher today.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch