myonlinegym asked: How do you feel about this statement "teens look at comics, adults look at magazines"?

Consider the audience

My first thought is “this is going to make a great blog post”. My next thoughts were more practical on how you can apply this thinking to your projects.

Kids are simultaneously simpler and yet more difficult to target. You have to get into their mindset. There’s a great article on ‘A List Apart’ about creating forms for kids. They bring to light many good points. Here are a few:
• kids don’t make usernames, they make nicknames.
• kids don’t create passwords, they are secret codes.

You’ll be much more effective if you talk to your audience in terms they can relate to. 

This means you have to understand your audience’s abilities and interests. Comic books use images to talk to kids. This is an ingenious because:
A) kids are just learning to read,
B) images supporting the content helps them grasp the story regardless of their reading ability, and
C) stories are more entertaining to children, therefore will hold their attention longer.

Magazines, on the other hand, relate better to adults because while we’re becoming more and more accustomed to small bites of information, there is still the opportunity to delve deeper into topics we deem worthy. If you’re not sure you want to spend the time to read an entire article you can look at the supporting image, read the caption or lead-in and you’ll have a general idea of what it’s about. Then you can make an informed decision whether the article is worth reading. 

But as I told my friend this is a much larger topic than the two examples above. Don’t get me wrong, I generally agree, but there are many more ways to consume content then comics and magazines. We have to consider books, twitter, facebook, movies, TV, podcasts and so on… There are generalizations we can make that suit certain cultures or age brackets, but in my opinion, it is a much bigger discussion.

The point to take away though, is to look at your target audience and learn how they like to consume the type of content you are producing. Then produce it in the ways that suit them. Simple, right? Please remember that things change, so you need to monitor your readers to see what types of content, and content production get a reaction. Example: when I post a video with a blog entry, I will get more visits and more referral links than  if I post text alone. I can then learn that my audience likes to consume information from me via video and I should try to incorporate it whenever I can. 

I hope this helps you to consider your audience as much as the the content you’re producing. I would appreciate any examples you have of something you’ve done that your audience liked, and how you moved your content in a direction that best suited your audience.