Millennial Marketing

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter get all the social media headlines. But ask Millennials what other ‘must see’ sites they visit and you get some interesting answers. Here are a few you may want to bookmark:

1. Failblog.org  This site featuring embarassing and ridiculous videos and pictures gets over 3.6 million visitors a month according to Alexa. Visitors can contribute their own Fail candidates and vote on what should appear on the home page. The site is not only huge it is sticky. The average visitor spends 5.2 minutes and traffic is up 47% in the past 3 months.

2. Fmylife.com With over 3.5 million monthly visitors, this site enjoys roughly the same popularity as Failblog and works on the same idea, only stories rather than video and pictures. Fmylife works on the premise that things that go wrong can be terribly funny and there’s always someone having a worse day than you. The stories are short and end the same way – FML. Here’s a sampling:

Today, my girlfriend dumped me proclaiming she wanted someone more like her “Edward”. I asked her who Edward was. She held up a copy her “Twilight” book. She was talking about a fictional vampire. FML

Today, I texted my college boyfriend to tell him how terrible I felt about cheating. He replied saying he was so relieved because he had been cheating on me with a girl in his dorm. I was talking about my math exam. FML

3.  Textsfromlastnight.com TFLN reaches over 1.9 million monthly people. The site is popular among a younger, fairly wealthy, college educated, more male audience.  Most have a sexual angle and many are genuinely funny. Texts include the senders’ area code and are ranked by the viewers.  

(919): Apparently I signed “I love you” on my bar tab last night.

(315): Instead of having sex, we spent the entire night making pillow forts and have sword fights. I think I’m in love

4. Sporcle.com College students are expert procrastinators, and the current rage is a trivia quiz site called Sporcle.com According to Alexa, this site was up 60% in traffic last month alone and indexes above average among males and people 18-24.  The attraction is timed knowledge games on every subject imaginable from most valuable brands by country to Pokemon to the periodic table.  The average time spent per user is a whopping 14.9 minutes.

According to my daughter and her roommates, “It’s the fun, addictive thing you can check every hour or so, when suddenly what ever you’re doing doesn’t look so appealing.”   I’m told the games are often played as a group, or even competitively.  What’s the attraction? “Hey, I know more than I thought I did (and more than you).”  A Twitter search reveals that the game is most often described as ‘additive’. 

“don’t know where you got that sporcle site from, but i’ve been doing that the last 2 days instead of work…my employer thanks you”

“Sporcle is awesome and addicting”

What does it mean?

All four of these sites skew heavily to college age, college educated young adults.  Like a lot of social media, whether it is a ‘time waster’ or not depends on whether you think entertainment is a ‘waste of time’. On the plus side, it is interactive and social, and more involving than say, TV. I’ve spent a few days watching teen television shows and I have to say I found sporcle more fun.