Youngsters in India spend more time online than on TV: ViziSense Study

According to the research, Internet is a prefered medium compared to television for youngsters in India. 56% of them spend more than 2 hours on the internet during the weekday as against just 44% of them spending even more than 1 hour watching television. The engagement with internet further increases on weekends with 69% youngsters spending more than 2 hours as compared to 35% spending more than 3 hours watching television.

An interestng highlight of the study was that yougsters prefer to visit Facebook and social media pages of companies rather than their websites for information around companies and their products/offerings.

According to the research, almost all youngsters (15-24 years) rely on the internet when it comes to mobiles, computers and car purchases. The term computer broadly includes tablets and laptops.

Close to 2/3rd of the youngsters online have been actively using the internet for more than 2 years making them "mature' users of the medium. Their confidence in the medium is also reflected by the fact that 81% of users are comfortable sharing personal information online.

The usage of Internet by youngsters further extends to mobile with 50% of them accessing the web daily through their mobile phones. Apart from checking mails and social networking which is done by 79% and 67% of mobile web users respectively, it is seen that they are warming up to mobile e-commerce with 23% of them using mobile to make online payments.

Commenting on the trend of behaviour of youth online, Amit Bhartiya, GM - ViziSense said "Online is now entrenched in the daily lives of youth in India, more than any other medium. They show high dependance on the use of the Internet for almost all their commerce, entertainment and other content consumption and this should only reinforce the importance of this medium for marketers. The other strong message that came out through the research is that youth prefer online to other media is because it facilitates two-way interaction and engagement with brands and companies vs. any other media".