Vital Stats - Targeting 20-somethings online

by Alex Burmaster, Media Week 27-Mar-07

Twenty-somethings are a highly desirable target group for advertisers, but where are they most likely to be found online? There are 5.7 million Britons aged 20 to 29 using the internet, with one in five online today being in their 20s, compared with one in nine a year ago.

The sites with the greatest concentration of 20-somethings provide
publishers and advertisers with an excellent guide to how online is an
integral part of modern life. The top 10 contains two career sites, two

clubbing sites, two sites related to eating and one each related to

weddings, shopping, video and social networking.

Graduate recruitment site Milkround has the greatest affinity with 20 to
29-year-olds; 86% of Milkround's audience is in this age group. This
means, for example, that an advertiser is four and a half times more
likely to find someone in their 20s on Milkround, than they are across
the web as a whole. Milkround is followed by wedding service site
Confetti and retailer Selfridges - just under two-thirds of the audience
to these sites are in their 20s.

The appearance of social networking site Orkut illustrates the "reach
versus likelihood" quandary that an advertiser faces when targeting
online, while an advertiser looking to target 20-somethings could
potentially reach 48,000 of them on Orkut, compared to 1.6 million on
MySpace or 447,000 on Bebo. The latter sites, being much more popular
generally, will also contain a much higher "irrelevance" factor. Whereas
only 42% of the audience to Orkut are not in the desired target group,
this rises to 70% on MySpace and 83% on Bebo.

This greater irrelevance factor shows how demographic targeting can
provide advertisers with more efficient ways of finding their target
audience online.

- Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings.