Teens are leading the way in creating and sharing content online. In articles in both the San Jose Mercury News and the Washington Post, the phenomena was studied and explained by a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. These trends have a strong impact on the social web and tells us who is creating what type of user-generated content on the web.

The main findings were that there has been an increase in the amount of total content online that is being created by teens (age 12-17) at currently 64%, up from 57% in 2004.

Among some of the other interesting findings from the study:

- More girls than boys said they wrote blogs and kept up with friends via MySpace
and Facebook.

- Pew found that 35 percent of all online teen girls blog, compared with 20 percent of online teen boys.

- YouTube and other video-sharing sites tend to be the domain of boys. Online teen boys are twice as likely as girls to post video files online, by 19 percent to 10 percent.

- Forty-one percent of teens who use MySpace, Facebook or similar sites say they send messages to friends via those sites every day. More than half of teens - 55 percent - reported having a profile on sites like MySpace or Facebook, and 42 percent of those teens said they also blog.

- As a result of teens using social networking sites to send messages, more and more teens are using email less.

Some very interesting information here to digest, particularly as it pertains to social networking and sports sites. Girls and women will have to be of increasing focus for those who want to expand the sports networking market, since girls are leading the way in blogging. Males should be the focus in providing an avenue for videos to be uploaded and shared. Finally, marketing of sport social networks should be placed not only on the adult (18-35) age bracket as studies like the Fantasy Sports Trade Association have shown, but also on teens, so that when they are college age, they can participate fully in sports networks like Fantasy Sports Matrix and the like.

The teens are the future of the web and they’re leading the way. It’s up to sports network entrepreneurs to capture and cater to this important demographic.