Marketing Boomers

Seniors are hitting the Web in droves, searching for everything from health care advice to love.

You may think of the Web as the exclusive domain of the young, but it’s not. Between 2000 and 2004, the percentage of seniors—people aged 65 or older—going online jumped by 47%, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

As today’s Web-surfing baby boomers become tomorrow’s senior Netizens in the next decade, that percentage will increase, equaling the percentage of time Generation Y-ers and X-ers spend online.

Today, 58% of Americans age 50-64 regularly use the Internet, as do 75% of people age 30-49. As they get older and begin to scale back on work responsibilities, boomers and their younger siblings will have the discretionary income and the time to surf the Net.

Women age 50-64 today are just as likely to go online as men. In 2000, about 60% of wired seniors were men and 40% were women, but by 2004, there was a 50-50 split. And, if women boomers follow the same pattern as women in the general population, there soon will be more boomer women online than men, and they will spend more money in more places.

Companies that currently focus their online energies on winning and keeping the cherished 18-to-34-year-old male, might want to take another look at what one Pew analyst called the “senior tsunami.”

Online seniors today as a group reflect the general online population—the majority of them white, educated, and reasonably well off. But that is changing across the board as greater efforts are made by private and public interests to close the digital divide.

Within this decade, the cyber population will be as diverse as the global population, and all of us will have to change our perceptions of the cyber world.

Pew also tells us that wired seniors are as enthusiastic as younger users. Fully 94% of online seniors have sent and received e-mail. Some 66% have used search engines to find answers to questions regarding health or finance issues, or to comparison shop.

And increasingly, older surfers will shop online. By the end of 2003, 47% of online seniors had bought something on the Web. That percentage will skyrocket as many older surfers enter a comfort zone with cyber security and reliability.

“Ten years ago, a lot of us didn’t even know how to get online,” says Alice Solomon, 67, founder of GorgeousGrandma.com, a support site for aging single women, and author of Find the Love of Your Life After 50. All that has changed, and seniors are now enthusiastically participating in the online dating scene.

Since 2000, the number of over-50 singles using Match.com’s dating service has tripled to 934,000, according to Time magazine. SeniorFriendFinder.com’s membership jumped from 95,000 in 2001 to 313,000 in 2004.

A dozen or so new sites have popped up to cash in on the success of cyber-dating services for seniors, including SilverSingles.com, SeniorsCircle.com and Yahoo’s ThirdAge Personals.

Advice: Today’s boomers will be tomorrow’s senior cyber citizens—dating, shopping, surfing, e-mailing and being entertained all from the comfort of home. Enormous opportunities await the companies that capitalize on this emerging mass of online buyers.