Women’s online vices
There’s more to women’s online activities than socializing and shopping – for one thing, adult sites have a 34% reach among female onliners around the globe (compared to 46% for males), while gambling destinations boast a close to 7% reach (7.7%), and women are more likely than men to visit sweepstakes websites, according to a comScore report, Women On The Web: How Women Are Shaping the Internet.
Girls are gamers too, albeit gentle ones.
“Women’s high engagement with games and online gaming sites may come as a bit of a surprise,” says comScore. “However, this is indicative of the evolution of the gaming landscape, which has given rise to casual gaming, an activity that is very popular among women. Women are much more likely to play casual games – ie Solitaire, Sudoku and Scrabble – than action, adventure, and sports games, which are typically favored by young males.
“With a variety of casual games now available for networked online play (‘play with your friends’) within social networks, these familiar games and activities are making an even greater resurgence online.”
When it comes to online clips, the reach of video among women is unsurprisingly behind that of men. However, girls do like their YouTube, and even in markets where the viral video monster is not the leading provider – such as Hong Kong and Japan – women are still far more likely to watch a video on YouTube than on any other video property.
“[Females] have spawned a whole new genre of Internet games, and have driven much of the blogging and photo sharing activity,” says comScore. “They tweet, they share, they shop, they search – but for their own reasons, in their own way and on their own terms. The main thing holding them back is Internet connectivity, and that barrier will gradually be removed going forward.”
Sabine Stork, founding partner, Thinktank International Research: The research both reinforces and undermines online myths – but it also proves there is such a thing as a ‘women’s world web’
