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What are the top youth media brands in 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and current?
Hi there! Thanks for asking about the top youth brands in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and today, include dates of brand launches. The short answer is that MTV and Nintendo were popular youth brands in the 1980s; Nintendo, Sega, and Disney were popular youth brands in the 1990s; MTV, CNN, and Yahoo were popular youth brands in the 2000s; YouTube and Netflix are the most popular youth brands currently. A deep dive of my methodology and findings is presented below.
METHODOLOGY
I searched across industry reports, surveys and poll data, and trusted media sites for historical and current evidence of brand popularity among youths aged 12-24 in each decade from 1980 through 2017, focusing specifically on media brands across both publisher and platform brands. While I was unable to find any precompiled data showing the popularity of media brands among a youth cohort over time, I was able to gather a wealth of statistics which reveal some of the top brands per decade. Though I could find no comprehensive comparison of all, or major, media brands for any decade before the current one, I will provide evidence supporting the popularity of each selected brand among the youth demographic in the following sections.
1980s: MTV & NINTENDO
MTV launched on August 1st, 1981, with a target audience aged 12 to 34. The channel, which achieved a median audience age of 23, "became a central cultural phenomenon for U.S. adolescents" in the 1980s, according to the authors of Media Messages. At launch, the company claimed to have 2.5 million cable customers, though it later revealed that the true number was less than a million. Just before a media campaign aimed at bringing in new subscribers was launched in March of 1982, a study of MTV's target audience showed a brand awareness of less than 20%. Four weeks after the $2 million "I Want My MTV" ad blitz, the same study was performed again, with results showing a recognition rate of 89%. As such, we can point to early 1982 as the time when MTV first showed dominance as a youth brand. The channel's popularity lasted throughout the decade and made impacts across other media. For example, MTV's refusal to include country music in its programming led to a complete absence of country music in the Billboard Top 100 list for the first time, and it took the country genre a decade to once again find a mainstream audience.
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was launched in the U.S. on October 18th, 1985. Despite initial skepticism from retailers, the first incarnation of the Nintendo platform broke sales records to become the best-selling video-game console in history. Adding to the brand's popularity, the Nintendo GameBoy was released on July 21, 1989 and saw such sky-high sales that Nintendo still touts it as "the most successful video game system ever released". The brand's original target audience, lasting until 2007, was youth under the age of 25.
1990s: NINTENDO, SEGA, & DISNEY
Nintendo's popularity continued into the '90s. By 1990, Nintendo's platform accounted for 90% of the video games market in the U.S. In the early 1990s, a Q-score survey revealed that the company's Mario character was more recognizable to U.S. children than was Disney's Mickey Mouse.
It wasn't until 1994, five years after Sega's launch of the Genesis console in 1989, that Nintendo had a rival for dominance amongst American gamers. Which company won the popularity war is disputed: according to Time, Nintendo had the top-selling 16-bit platform in the U.S., while the BBC claims that Sega eventually beat out Nintendo. Regardless, by the mid-1990s, both Nintendo and Sega were the top-selling video game platforms in the U.S.
The 1990s also saw the revitalization of the Disney brand, with the decade since termed the "Disney Renaissance". From 1989 to 1999, the company released ten new animated films. Following the success of the 1989 film, The Little Mermaid, the company saw benefit in expanding their films' target audience beyond a "kiddie demographic," and this new strategy brought record-breaking success. For instance, 1992's Aladdin was the top-grossing film that year, selling 50 million tickets (equivalent to 1/5th of the U.S. population) by its 23rd week. Disney's '90s movies were so popular across all ages that 3 of its films are among the top 25 films of the entire decade, based on domestic U.S. gross.
2000s: MTV, CNN, & YAHOO
Starting off the decade, MTV proved to be the most popular cable channel in a survey of college students in 2001. According to a demographer quoted by AdAge, MTV appealed to that generation of youth for the same reasons that video games did: loud graphics, rapid edits, and moving cameras that are "impossible for adults to follow."
Looking towards the end of the decade, we can see the popularity of cable television among this generation of youth in the results of surveys Pew Research conducted in 2009-2010 on millennials then-aged 18 to 29. 65% of this age group reported receiving their news from television, compared to 59% receiving most of their news from the internet. For those who got their news from television, 43% chose a cable news source compared to just 18% choosing network news. This survey found that CNN was the top television news source amongst the 18 to 29 age group; the channel was chosen as the top news source by 24%. Amongst internet news sources, Yahoo was the most popular at 20%, followed by CNN at 18%, and Google at just 10%.
2010s: YOUTUBE & NETFLIX
Currently, YouTube, which launched in May 2005, is the most popular media brand, and the most popular brand overall in the youth demographic. In an annual survey of brand awareness among kids and tweens, YouTube ranked first in 2016. In a 2017 survey of teenagers aged 13-17, YouTube was rated the top brand, achieving the highest marks for both brand awareness and perceived coolness of the brand.
Netflix, which originally launched in 1997, ranked second for top brands among teenagers aged 13-17 in that same 2017 survey. Amongst kids and tweens surveyed for the 2016 study mentioned above, Netflix came in at 11th overall, but fourth in media brands (behind Youtube at #1, Disney at #6, and Disney Channel at #9).
Amongst millennials aged 18-24, the 2017 survey once again confirmed that YouTube is the top-rated brand, with Netflix coming in second.
Given these results, we can be quite certain that YouTube and Netflix are the top media brands currently for youth aged 12-24.
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up, the top media brands for youth aged 12-24 for each decade have been identified as: MTV and Nintendo in the 1980s; Nintendo, Sega, and Disney in the 1990s; MTV, CNN, and Yahoo in the 2000s, YouTube and Netflix today.
I hope this helps! Thanks for asking Wonder. Please let us know if we can help with anything else!