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London. A 15-year-old Briton has set the financial world abuzz with a research note penned for a major US bank in which he reveals teenagers’ media habits — including the view that Twitter is just not hip.

Matthew Robson wrote the report while working as a summer intern with US bank Morgan Stanley in London. The result was described by his boss, Edward Hill-Wood, as “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen.”

The research note — which has been circulated to Morgan Stanley clients — reveals that while teenagers consume a huge variety of media, from television to computer games to the Internet and music, they are unwilling to pay for it.

He said teenagers were keen users of social-networking site Facebook, but were generally uninterested in Twitter, the microblogging service beloved by celebrities.

“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he wrote.

While many teenagers sign up for it, texting Twitter messages uses up cellphone credit and they would rather use that for normal text messages, he wrote. Plus, no one views their profiles so the tweets are “pointless.”

A source at Morgan Stanley in London said there had been a “phenomenal” response to the research paper, which was sent to specialist investors in the media sector around the world.

“We thought it would be interesting to clients, sent it out and they thought it was great. It’s very different from the normal type of research,” the source said, adding it was highly unusual for the bank to compile a report this way.

Robson, from Greenwich in southeast London, texted a few friends to get ideas for the research paper, which was reportedly written in one day.

“Teenagers listen to a lot of music, mostly whilst doing something else,” he wrote, adding, “They are very reluctant to pay for it.”

They rarely buy CDs, preferring to use Web sites that stream music or to download it illegally. Most teens view paying even 79 pence ($1.30) for a song on iTunes as too expensive.

Robson said teenagers watched television but did not have time to watch regular programs, preferring to watch them afterward online.

Morgan Stanley makes no claims for the report’s statistical vigor. But in a preface, it said teenagers were “at the vanguard of this digital revolution” and as a result it “seems an excellent way of assessing how the media landscape will evolve.”

The report concludes with a list of what is hot and what is not: anything with a touch screen, mobile phones with a large capacity for music and “really big tellies” are hot. “Anything with wires,” however, is not.



Agence France-Presse