👦 Analysts Reveal Insights Into Teen Media Consumption

According to Ruslan Tagiev, CEO of Mediascope, teenagers aged 12–17 spend over six hours a day in the digital environment, with gadgets accounting for 80% of their total media consumption. For comparison, the average audience over the age of 12 has a more modest figure, spending around four hours daily.

The youth demographic demonstrates a massive lead in adopting new technologies: the daily audience for AI assistants among teenagers reaches 30%, and the monthly audience stands at 77% (compared to 11% and 50% among the adult population, respectively). TikTok remains the most popular platform for young users, whereas VKontakte leads among the older generation.

In gaming, teenagers prefer the fast-paced action genre, while adults favor casual games. Animation commands a huge share of video viewing structures: 7 out of the 10 most popular titles among teenagers are animated projects, with anime holding four spots in the top tier.

The TV series Jujutsu Kaisen topped the search query charts for young audiences, while the top five also included the Avatar franchise, the melodrama Lily of the Valley, the anime Hell’s Paradise, and the crime drama Children of Change.

A joint study by the Institute for Internet Development (IRI) and VCIOM revealed that by ages 11–14, consumption models undergo a transformation, as animation begins to give way to movies (43%) and TV series (33%). At this age, children pivot toward searching for answers to life’s questions, and “ideal heroes” in their eyes are replaced by characters facing complex moral choices.

Concurrently, parental control weakens rapidly: by the time they reach adolescence, 74% of children search for content entirely on their own, easily bypassing any technical restrictions.