17. Companies that assume

online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

True

I find this response great insight into what has happened over the ten years since this book was first published. It is clear today that their is a different audience that focuses on the web rather than old style media.

Yes there is that exception of the over 50 web user that knows the in’s and out’s of more than e-mail and the occasional website. But the majority of people over the age of 50 have little to no knowledge of the web.  According to a study conducted by a Morrell, Mayhorn, and Bennett in an issue of “Human Factors: The Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society” we can see that people over the of 75 have little to no knowledge of the web and for people over 40, their primary use is to get their e-mail and book a trip.  This was a great study and if you are interested in the relationship between age groups and web use, I highly recommend you check this out.

As I said there are those exceptions but for the most part, especially in 2009, the under 30 crowd is getting almost all of their information via the web. The over 40 crowd is primarily sticking to old-school-main-stream media  and your 30 year olds are a mix of the two. Some want to hold on to the old school, some want the new style, and a majority use some combination of the two.

In my opinion, for the authors of the Cluetrain to catch onto this in 1999 is quite brillant. The web didn’t have as wide a variety of use as it does in 2009, but there was still the obvious forboding to the split of users and non-users and I am glad they caught this split back then.