It will come as no surprise to anyone who had a large stack of 'bicycle maintenance' magazines as a teenager, but new research has discovered that young people's online search patterns reveal a preoccupation with sex and pornography.
The survey, conducted via a Symantec web-monitoring service for parents, scanned 3.5 million searches made between February 2008 and July 2009 and found that young people's interests were headed up by video, music, networking, shopping and sex.
The top ten search terms, according to the study, are:
- YouTube
- Sex
- MySpace
- Porn
- Yahoo
- Michael Jackson
- Fred (a popular YouTube performer)
- eBay
Symantec's internet safety advocate Marian Merritt was not particularly shocked by the findings. "Any of us who have been teenagers are not surprised kids look for information about sex," she said.
Whilst keyword research is vital for digital direct marketing, particularly for search engine optimisation and PPC campaigns, we'd advise against using some of the above terms to target children. If you do, you'll soon find that – contrary to received wisdom – all publicity is not good publicity.
