Teens Hit the Online Mall

Survey data collected by PC Data Online found that teenagers represented a considerable part of May’s online shoppers.

Individuals in the 13-19 age group accounted for 17.4 percent of the overall online traffic for home-based non-AOL users, and 16.4 percent of the May online shopping traffic. PC Data defines shopping traffic as the total number of visitors who went to at least one of the top 200 shopping-related sites in the month of May. In raw numbers, this means that approximately 5,042,000 teens went to at least one of the shopping sites in the month of May, from a total of 30,777,000 shoppers.

According to PC Data, the impact of teens was even more pronounced at several of the top 200 shopping sites. Nearly one-third of the traffic at two music-related sites, bmg.com and ubl.com, was made up of teenagers, PC Data found. Other sites with a high concentration of teens include gaming, ticket, and music sites such as CDnow.com (28 percent) and ticketmaster.com (25.6 percent).

Auction sites, such as firstauction.com and ubid.com, were less popular among adolescents, as each received less than 10 percent of their traffic from the 13-19 age group. eBay’s online auctions did rank high with teen shoppers, according to the data.