Boomers and Seniors: A Growing Internet Demographic

Internet entrepreneurs have discovered that boomers and seniors are hot. Not sexy hot--money hot. They have money to spend, and that makes them persons of interest. One indication of that interest is the increasing number of articles on how to attract the oldsters to your business products and services. Direct and to the point--they have money. We want it.

The same monetary impulse shows up less directly in the boomlet of social sites directed at the wrinkle generation. Until the last year or so, you would have been hard put to find any site for seniors that didn't focus on health aids, Social Security, avoiding scams, and general advice on how to enjoy your life even as you slipped helplessly downhill. These were Web 1.0 sites that talked at seniors, offering them authoritative advice--and lots of advertisements.

Even as new sites proliferate, some more or less clueless developers are following this Web 1.0 pattern. On the new internet--Web 2.0--interactivity has become such a basic requirement that even the oldest sites are beginning to revamp their look and their we-talk-you-listen attitude.

What do boomers and seniors really want?

Seniors who are familiar with the internet want the same features the youngsters enjoy: the ability to hook up with old friends and make new ones, sharing their photos and music, and blogging their thoughts and ideas. Many of them have tried Myspace and Facebook, among others, and have left because of the heavily youth-centric atmosphere. They don't want hundreds of "friends" with whom they have nothing in common. They don't want to be lost among millions of people jostling for attention, or have to tolerate the animosity with which the youngsters sometimes express the feeling that this is their space, and that older people are unwanted outsiders.

Where can they go? What do they want their social sites to offer? Developers are grappling with these questions, and the answers they are coming up with look very different from each other. The pattern seems to be that younger people looking to make money from this demographic put up the ads first, and then develop the features according to their own ideas of what seniors and boomers want.

The more viable approach is by developers who are themselves 50 or over, and who design their sites with the features they would like to have. Even then, creating a site popular enough to attract advertisers and other money interests isn't an easy problem, and to date, no social site has really solved it.

Many older netizens have already have found comfortable niches and activities and are busy playing with all the new web technologies. Newbies venturing onto the internet for the first time may need some hand-holding, and features that are very easy to use. Personal interests vary, as among any other age group. Some people prefer discussions, other want amusements. Realistically speaking, is age even a relevant factor for most seniors? Are age-segregated sites just a stop-gap as seniors venture onto the web for the first time, a short-term phenomenon that will be become obsolete as the world is increasingly net-oriented?