Link wrap: teens, Twitter, Facebook, sharing

Teenagers don’t buy papers, don’t use Twitter, don’t listen to radio

This Morgan Stanley report, written by a 15-year-old, got a lot of coverage recently. This excerpt is from an FT story.

Morgan Stanley’s European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, one of the bank’s interns from a London school, to describe his friends’ media habits. His report proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen. So we published it,” said Edward Hill-Wood, head of the team.

However, he made no claims for its statistical rigour.

As elderly media moguls gathered at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, to fawn over Twitter and fret over their business models, Mr Robson set out a sobering case that tomorrow’s consumers are using more and more media but are unwilling to pay for it.

“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he pronounced. Updating the micro-blogging service from mobile phones costs valuable credit, he wrote, and “they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless”.

His peers find it hard to make time for regular television, and would rather listen to advert-free music on websites such as Last.fm than tune into traditional radio. Even online, teens find advertising “extremely annoying and pointless”.

Their time and money is spent instead on cinema, concerts and video game consoles which, he said, now double as a more attractive vehicle for chatting with friends than the phone.

Mr Robson had little comfort for struggling print publishers, saying no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text” rather than see summaries online or on television.

Sharing on Facebook more common than sharing by email

From Mashable (via Beatbloggers) and sourced to AddToAny comes this:

According to AddToAny, Facebook now dominates sharing, with 24 percent of shares from the widget consisting of users posting items to the social network. That handily beats out email (11.1 percent) and Twitter (10.8 percent), making the world’s most popular social network also the most popular service for sharing content. This is undoubtedly welcome news atFacebook, as the site continues to emphasize sharing and readies its own real-time search engine.

Interestingly, if you combine all of Yahoo’s properties – Delicious, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, and Yahoo Messenger – it accounts for 14.4 percent of sharing, making it second on the list. Less surprising,MySpace has fallen well down the ranks with just 5 percent of shares. Other notables include Digg at 4.4 percent, Bebo at 3.1 percent, and LinkedIn at a mere 0.4 percent. Meanwhile, the demise of email sharing isn’t all that surprising considering that on the whole, social networking now has more reach than email worldwide.

’10 lessons from the stolen Twitter docs saga’

Twitter had its Google Docs broken into recently and they were published on TechCrunch. This summary comes from Silicon Alley Insider (well, it’s an excerpt of a summary).

A malicious hacker broke into a Twitter employee’s Google Docs account and forwarded some 300 secret company documents to TechCrunch.

[Here], in a more digestible format, are the 10 things we learned from Twitter’s stolen docs saga:

Google wants to do a Twitter search deal very badly. Google SVP of product Marissa Mayer met with top Twitter execs so much that in notes from one meeting, they called her constant requests to hear how Twitter was growing a “huge distraction.” In a later meeting, Twitter execs discussed a potential search deal with Google at great length. The gist seems to be that Google would introduce a new “micro-blogs” search product on Google.com that would feature 90% Twitter content. “This is the biggest change to Google search in years,” read the notes. (See the docs)

Twitter does not want to be acquired. Meeting notes titled “What do we want to be when we grow up?” start with a the question: “Is our goal not to be acquired?” And while the notes do hit on a reminder that “there is obviously a price,” it feels like the execs want to answer “no.” The notes say that a proposed merger with Facebook “never felt right,” and that “the only type of acquisitions we are interested in are ones where we stay in charge.” The one factor that could change their minds? “We don’t know if we can match our ambition on our own.” (See the docs)

Twitter planned an IPO or sale of the company next year. According to notes from a meeting in which execs discuss bankers the startup could work with, Twitter execs plan to “engage” with one “for a year and a half” and “then use them for the transaction.” One banker described in the meeting, Paul Chamberlin, is described as the guy who “took Google public, DoubleClick to Google.” (See the docs).

Twitter doesn’t know how it’s going to make money. That’s not to say Twitter doesn’t have lots of revenue-making product ideas — one document lists verified accounts, search ads, sponsored tweets, AdSense widgets, and “payments,” — but in fact, having so many ideas only goes to show Twitter doesn’t know which one product to focus its resources around and finally make money. (See the docs)