Research note by British ‘teenage scribbler' causes City sensation

Research note by British ‘teenage scribbler' causes City sensation

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York 2009-07-13

A research note written by a 15-year-old, who was not born when former UK chancellor Nigel Lawson dismissed City analysts as “teenage scribblers”, has become the talk of middle-aged media executives and investors.

Morgan Stanley's European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, one of the bank's interns from a London school, to describe his friends' media habits. His report proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen. So we published it,” said Edward Hill-Wood, head of the team.

The response was enormous. “We've had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day,” said Mr Hill-Wood, 35, estimating that the note had generated five or six times more feedback than the team's usual reports. However, he made no claims for its statistical rigour.

As elderly media moguls gathered at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, to fawn over Twitter and fret over their business models, Mr Robson set out a sobering case that tomorrow's consumers are using more and more media but are unwilling to pay for it.

“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he pronounced. Updating the micro-blogging service from mobile phones costs valuable credit, he wrote, and “they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless”.

His peers find it hard to make time for regular television, and would rather listen to advert-free music on websites such as Last.fm than tune into traditional radio. Even online, teens find advertising “extremely annoying and pointless”.

Their time and money is spent instead on cinema, concerts and video game consoles which, he said, now double as a more attractive vehicle for chatting with friends than the phone.

Mr Robson had little comfort for struggling print publishers, saying no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text” rather than see summaries online or on television.

当年长的媒体大亨在爱达荷州太阳谷(Sun Valley)Allen & Co会议上对Twitter大加赞扬，并对自己的商业模式感到烦恼之际，罗布森提出了一个令人警醒的观点：未来的消费者正在更多地使用媒体，但不愿为此付费。

罗布森表示：“青少年不使用Twitter。”他写道，用手机更新这项微型博客服务，需要花费宝贵的储值，而且“他们意识到，没有人关注他们的档案，因此他们的tweets毫无意义。”

罗布森的同龄人发现，很难找到时间定时看电视，同时与传统的电台广播相比，他们更愿意在Last.fm等网站上收听没有广告的音乐。即使在网上，青少年发现广告“非常烦人，而且毫无意义”。

他们的时间和金钱都花在了电影、音乐会和视频游戏机上，他表示，视频游戏机也可用作聊天工具，其吸引力超过电话。

罗布森对苦苦挣扎的印刷媒体出版商没有提供多少安慰。他称，他认识的青少年中没有人经常阅读报纸，因为多数人懒得看一页又一页的文字内容，而宁可在网上或电视上观看内容提要。

译者/君悦