Yahoo! Draws Younger Audience; The Wealthy Use Google
Yahoo! Search attracts a younger audience than Google…
“Research firm Hitwise has put together an analysis that looks at the demographics that Yahoo Search attracts compared to people using Google’s search engine tend to be older and more well off than those using rival services…”
A recent Hitwise article revealed some interesting demographic numbers that the company has measured through their sources. In comparing American Google and Yahoo search users, Hitwise found that Google has a higher percentage of users in older age brackets than Yahoo.
Heather Hopkins, VP of research at Hitwise, decided to correlate some findings regarding search engine use, age and affluence. The results are not terribly surprising, but bring up some interesting questions. First, her data:
“According to Hopkins, Yahoo Search attracts a younger audience than Google. In the 18-24 year old category Yahoo received 19.33 percent of visits compared to the same demographic for Google, which received 17.91 percent.”
“I cross checked this data against our Lifestyle data, to be sure that we were not missing the kids of these householders. Our Lifestyle data confirms that the groups that are highly indexed on Google tend to be older (55+) and the groups highly indexed on Yahoo! Search tend to be younger.”
“Also, apart from being older, Google users tend to spend more money online; Whereas, Yahoo users, conversely, were often younger and spent less money online.”
Interestingly, this negates some of existing beliefs in the market about the composition of those two user groups; a commonly held belief has been that Yahoo was for the aged, Google for the youth. Maybe not:
In the 25-34 year old category Yahoo again captured a higher percentage of visitors with 23.1320.37 percent. percent compare to Google, which grabbed
When looking at the 45-54 year old group the results are the opposite. Google receives 20.0745-54 year old group while Yahoo in the same age group pulls in 17.9755 and over age group. Google draws 18.72 percent of visitors while Yahoo receives 17.23 percent. percent of visitors in the percent of visits. The same thing is true in the
The figure summarizes the audience strengths and weaknesses for the two search engines. Visits by MOSAIC Group to Search.Yahoo.com are plotted on the y-axis and to Google.com on the x-axis.
For example, the top left hand box indicates unique strengths for Yahoo! Search, in that they are groups that are over-indexed relative to the online population on Yahoo! Search but under-indexed on Google.com.
The bigger the bubble the higher the propensity — to have spent $500 online (based on offline data collected by Experian).
When it comes to spending online Hopkins concludes, “The groups over-indexed on Google.com relative to the online population — are those that are among the most likely to have spent more than $500 online. This indicates that Google users are more likely to be big online spenders.”
It makes for a very nice, even curve! One implication that can be drawn from this is that, since older Americans tend to have more money than their younger counterparts, and Google users in general also tend to be more affluent, targeting the Google search engine over other engines makes much more marketing since. Of course, this is in addition to the fact that Google’s market share in the search world hovers somewhere around 60% while Yahoo hovers around 20%.
These big spenders, along with other types of Google.com users, contributed to Google being the most popular website in the UK last year. The search engine averaged 25.1 million British visitors each month, according to market research firm Nielsen Online.
“Windows Live Messenger and eBay were also in the top three most used websites in the UK last year.”