Let’s face it. Your 14-year-old cousin is more Web savvy than you think. She knows the best way to deck out her MySpace profile, she can easily find all of the coolest music videos on YouTube, and she can shop online like nobody’s business.
Teenage girls are a huge market on the Internet and in teen magazines where editors are looking to expand their digital components to cater to their reader’s needs.
This week, Seventeen magazine re-launched its website, kicking off the cyber battle of many teen websites throughout the industry. Newly appointed Editor-in-Chief Ann Shocket said that there will be a web component with unique copy for every editorial page in the magazine.
CosmoGIRL! will also be re-launching its website in the upcoming months, along with fellow Hearst publication Teen. Condé Nast recently launched Flip.com, an online only magazine for teen girls.
I think more than any other market, it is important for teen magazines to take hold and excel in their online departments. Teenage girls today are among the first generation of magazine consumers to never know life without the Internet, and it will be interesting to see how they react to the bombardment of media and information all the time.
Kristen OGorman @ Sat, 03/17/2007 - 5:15pm
It's great that magazines are starting to look at the website as a separate entity rather than a place to replicate the magazine's content. Having original copy on the website will draw the readers to it. I rarely check the websites for my favorite magazines because it's just the same stuff that's in the magazine, but if the websites had original stories, I'd definitely check them out more often. A lot of magazines have already launched blogs, but creating even more original content will make the websites so much stronger.