When Time, Inc.'s Teen People shuts down its print edition this September and moves online for good, it will be migrating to where an increasing number of teens are spending their time.
But Teen People online will be facing a whole new set of challenges in attracting the young set, in some ways more daunting than those it faced competing for their attention in print.
True, teens spend an impressive chunk of their time online, but what they're doing there is something else entirely. They're spending a lot less time reading the sort of editorial they might read in print. Instead, they're tinkering with their blogs, visiting networking sites and connecting with friends.
Magazine sites like ELLEgirl.com, whose print edition was closed earlier this year, report strong traffic, in numbers that compete with their print circulations. Yet those numbers are dwarfed by traffic to the new breed of teen sites, like MySpace, the social networking site.
None of the teen magazine sites even registers on Nielsen//Netratings 12-17 panels. Only TeenPeople.com draws enough traffic to show up on Netratings' total visitor count.
In order to compete, magazines sites will have to reinvent themselves, abandoning the model of recent years, in which the site was merely an extension, or mirror, of the print title.
The big question: What must they become? And the bigger question: Will they be too late?
"What's happened now is the internet has been the drug of choice for teenagers with MySpace, iPods and texting. [The teen category] is the first group of magazines that the internet put out of business," says Martin Walker of magazine consultancy Walker Communications.
Where are teens spending their online time?
Some 67.5 percent of girls 13-17 visit and join social networking sites, according to Burst Media data for May from eMarketer. But their traffic to MySpace, Facebook, Xanga and other networking sites doesn't tell the whole story, as savvy teens' web use grows ever more sophisticated.
A list of Nielsen//NetRatings' top 15 sites most visited by girls 12-17 is dominated by names like FreeFlashToys.com, FreeCodeSource.com and Createblog.com. These sites are loaded with MySpace wallpapers and means to customize and upload video, photo slideshows and quizzes to blogs or networking sites.
Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer, says user-generated content is a central and growing part of teens' online experience.
"Teenagers and girls in particular are strong users of the community generated aspects" of web sites, she says. "Meeting new people online is really important to them."
But even so, she says, there may be more room for teen magazines online than there is in print. She calls the move of teen magazines to the web a smart idea. "This is definitely a generation that is growing up with the internet that doesn't need to have a print magazine backing up an online venture," she says. While a known brand name can't hurt, this generation "doesn't need an offline brand name to make something successful."
The first test of that, of course, is Hachette Filipacchi's ELLEgirl, which stopped publishing in print after its July/August issue, making this the first month that ELLEgirl.com runs as a standalone.
ELLEgirl's online editor Anne Sachs says the site's traffic has grown enough that it has more online visitors than it had print subscribers, and July was its best month ever. She attributes that in part to the amount of time girls spend online, and in part to ELLEgirl's community feel.
Teen girls, she says, "spend a lot more time online than they ever have before. So however much time they spend on magazines, it can't compete with the time they spend online." In other words, she says, teen titles have no choice but to get online. "They'll have to go where the reader is."
While the site has plenty of what has long been the meat of teen magazines—hair, makeup and boys—Sachs says the site is different because of how girls use it. The attraction is the same thing that draws teens to networking sites: interaction. ELLEgirl.com has highly active message boards, even if it is rare to find an actual discussion amid all the emotions. Still, girls seem to be going there to connect and they're filling the "Say what?" areas that run alongside each article with comments and questions.
Ultimately, Sachs says that for teens the online experience is all about connecting.
"For the most part, what they're asking for is to be part of a group of like-minded girls. I look at what they're doing online every day, and it seems to me that what they're doing online is being friends in a way that they couldn't be elsewhere."
Samantha Melamed is a staff writer for Media Life.
