According to Snowball.com, Generation Y plus Generation X equals "Generation i".?Snowball operates a network of sites including ClickChick.com and male entertainment site IGN, which all cater to the 13- to 29-year-old crowd, and is planning an IPO in March.?Snowball even went so far as to trademark the "Gen i" term.?The reasons to target Generation i are clear: demographics and disposable income, which is spent freely online.?Generation i, the largest generation since the baby boomers, is hard to pin down, but if advertisers and e-commerce companies hook this brand-savvy bunch early, they could have a lifetime customer.?"We define Generation i as a generation that has grown up on the Internet and is Web-centric," said Mark Jung, CEO of Snowball.?"I'm 38 and Web-savvy but didn't grow up with it.?There's a difference." According to the U.S.?Census Bureau, 15- to 24-year olds, a subset of Generation i, consisted of 67.7 million people in 1998 with a combined disposable income of $302.4 billion.?"This group of Internet user is more malleable and will use the Net for everything," said Brad Greenspan, chairman of eUniverse, which operates a network of sites targeting music fans and gamers.?"It's much better for advertisers to capture them now than try to convert them later." More ...
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