Go to our global site (EN/PL)
Older Internet users look for practical information in Lithuania
2007-01-08
A characteristic feature of the Lithuanian Internet is not only continuous growth in the number of its users and the dynamics of their behavior, but also changes in the socio-demographic structure of Internet users. As the gemiusAudience research shows, mainly the age structure of audience is changing. Constantly observed gradual growth of elderly people on the Internet stimulates interest in this socio-demographic group, its habits and favorite entertainment.
Analyzing data from the gemiusAudience research study it can be observed that Internet users not only surf the net more often but they also spend more time on the Internet. For example, in October a single user spent 13 hours 52 minutes on average on the Internet, which is 2 hours and 37 minutes longer than half a year ago, in April. The average number of visits performed by a single user also grew - in October the average user visited the Internet 47 times (or by 3 visits more than in April) and viewed 1030 pages on average (or 59.2% more than in April). An interesting fact is that devoting more time to the Internet and viewing more web pages, the average internet user allots less time to a single page view - the average page view duration was 48 seconds in October, comparing with April this time has shortened by 14 seconds.
The Top 10 web sites changed insignificantly within the last half of the year. Strong first positions were kept by portals such as Delfi.lt, One.lt, Zebra.lt, Autoplius.lt. Web sites Lrytas.lt and Draugas.lt, in which the number of Internet visitors grew during the last half of the year (36.2% and 19.3% respectively), rose and now they are on the 5th and 6th place respectively. Web sites Klase.lt (the number of visitors grew by 6.7% in half a year) and Omni.lt (the number of visitors decreased by 22.4% in half a year), went down and now they are on the 7th and 8th place respectively. Supermama.lt (the number of visitors grew by 28.8% in half a year) and Kompiuterija.lt (the number of visitors grew by 50.1% in half a year) rose by several positions and got into the Top 10.
Examining how the socio-demographic structure of Internet visitors changed during last half of the year, we can single out these main tendencies: the proportion of women and men in the Internet audience was and is approximately the same - around 50%. Perhaps age composition of Internet audience altered the most: the part of Internet users aged 15-24 decreased (from 43,1% in April to 39,7% in October) and the proportion of older (45 years old or older) internet users increased (from 18.0% in April to 20.6% in October). Even though the audience of Internet users older than 45 years constitute the fifth part of all Internet audience, the number constantly grows: they constituted 12.4% of all Internet audience two years ago (in October 2004). Because of this constant growth in audience composed by older people on the Internet, market campaign planners pay more attention to this audience and consequently to analysis of their behavior and needs.
Characteristic features of this socio-demographic group can be revealed through comparison of the data on their activity with the average Lithuanian Internet user's activity. It is possible to notice that indicators of traffic for older people are still a little bit lower than for the average Lithuanian Internet user. The average number of page views performed by older Internet visitors (439 pages) are more than two times lower than the average number of page views of the average Internet user (1030 pages) in October; moreover, Internet users older than 45 years, visit the Internet 27 times per month (e.g. 20 visits fewer) and spend there 8 hours 11 minutes per month (e.g. 5 hours and 40 minutes less) than the average Internet user. On the other hand, older people spend more time per a single page view - on average 1 minute 7 seconds (e.g. 19 seconds more than the average Internet user). The reason behind this may be not only reading habits of these people but also the content of web sites that they visit itself. The issue requires deeper more thorough analysis of the information presented there.
What are the web sites which older people visit mostly? The ranking created according to the indicator of audience composition (showing the part of a specific target group in a particular web site's audience) reveals that the part of users older than 45 years on some web sites constitute even a quarter of all visitors to that web site. As the gemiusAudience research study shows older people prefer more business-like web sites - on web sites, which present information concerning business, finances, law the proportion of older Internet users is the biggest; older users constitute a fairly big proportion of visitors to the news portals.
Even though the content of web sites visited by older people are mostly related to work than to entertainment, the number of older people connecting to the Internet from home or from work is almost the same (from work - 68.2%, from home - 65.0%). Analyzing the socio-demography of older users on the Internet it becomes clear that among older Internet users there are much more (than on average on the Internet) people with vocational or higher education, working as managers or specialists/officers. For example, there are 32.7% of users with vocational education between older Internet users (on average on the Internet 18.5%) and 45.3% with higher education (on average on the Internet 25,7%), there are 52,6% specialists / officers between older Internet users (on average on the Internet 33.3%) and 16.2% high/middle level managers (on average on the Internet 9.8%).
Press Contact
International Operations Department - contact@gemius.com
Download a complete version of the press release in a Word file