Saturday night, teens are rocking -- and it ain't to radio

The Pew Internet & American Life Project points to a stormy future for broadcast ratings, buried in a new report on how American families use the Internet. Pew surveyed 935 teens and their parents to ask questions such as whether parents monitor Internet content (yes) and do parents think the Internet has been a bad influence on kids (surprisingly, parents are ambivalent).

The bad news for broadcasters came on a little chart on page 3, titled "Gadget Ownership within Households." Teens and their parents tend to have the same number of gadgets, probably since discretionary income and interest in technology may be common under one roof. But parents and teens have different types of gadgets. All have heavy penetration of PCs and laptops, but parents tend to use cell phones more, while 51% of youths age 12 to 17 now have an MP3 player.

51% -- more than half -- of teens have iPod equivalents! Let's pause and digest that. (A) That's twice the rate as parents, suggesting the gadget interest is a major shift from the older generation to the younger. (B) Add it up with the other devices that teens use -- 72% own a desktop computer, 63% own a cell phone, 25% a laptop, and 8% a PDA -- and you see a world where today's youth are immersed in media devices that are not TV or radio. (C) 88% of teens in total say they use this technology to "make my life easier," and this list does not include TV or radio.

You can see where this is going. These kids will grow up, and as they take today's media habits with them, ad dollars will be shifted out of broadcast (whose ratings are falling) and into mobile media (the future for the Millennial Generation). We've seen a similar shift in video games in the past two decades. Back in 1990, the average age of a video gamer was 18 -- and today, 17 years later, that average age has increased 15 years to 33. The adults now trading Linden Dollars on Second Life started out playing The Hunt for Red October when George Sr. was in office.

Unfortunately for radio, today's teens have found new devices to get their kicks, and those include Wi-Fi internet and MP3 downloads, not airwaves. Advertisers are going to chase this market as tomorrow's adults change the dial.