NYT Scooped by 15 Year-Old: Teens Still Don’t Use Twitter

Next-big-things on the Web no longer need the endorsement of teens and tweens before they can really take off, according to an article in today’s New York Times about Twitter. Just 11 percent of Twitter users are aged 12-17, anyway.

From the New York Times:

“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.

Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”

All of this is old hat — an echo of the dispatch from 15-year-old British Morgan Stanley intern Matthew Robson, who put everyone in the financial world in a tizzy earlier this summer when he wrote a memo for his bosses detailing the media habits of his teenaged friends. In short: More social networking and chat through video game consoles than Tweetdeck (and lots of illegal downloading). Scooped!

Photo: Matthew Robson, courtesy of the Times.

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