With the annual vacations in schools commencing, a huge population of youngsters are looking for avenues to spend the hot summer months in the most entertaining manner. For long it has been a given that summer vacations are spent as family outings to one’s native places. Contrary to youths in the West, Indian teenagers are still not that into group vacationing or summer jobs. Taking a look at media consumption by the young population during summers, exchange4media attempts to find out how populated the online medium during this the vacation season.

Net – a cool respite

Online population is at its peak in India during summers. Even though the Net is accessed through mobile phones a lot, but in terms of time spent and engagement, Internet consumption as an indoor activity is definitely popular among the young online community. Social networking sites and gaming sites are showing trends of longer usage during the summers.

As confirmed by Rohit Sharma, Chief Operating Officer, Zapak Digital Entertainment Ltd, “Online gaming is the stickiest form of entertainment available and is now the most preferred option by the youth in India for indoor entertainment. Zapak.com has seen a rise in traffic by 25 per cent since April end. We have also introduced a new set of exciting games this summer like ‘Rodent Tree Jump’, ‘Extreme Heli Boarding’, ‘Urban Legend’, ‘Street Fight Match’, etc.”

Sidharth Rao, CEO, Webchutney, noted, “Though there is no concrete data yet to support this, intuitively, I am certain genres like social networking, casual gaming and browsing will rise in terms of time spent and engagement within the online community during the summers.”

Alok Kejriwal, CEO and Co-Founder, Games2win, said, “We are witnessing record traffic on Games2win in the past three weeks, indicating that time spent on the Internet, and especially on games, is coincidental with summer. Games like

‘Bridal Dress Ups’, ‘Great Indian Arranged Marriage’ and ‘Great Indian Honeymoon’ are doing rather well, again indicating that this is a summer theme syncing to real life events.”

The Internet is not just for the indoors this summer as it is getting highly accessed even while vacationing.

Hari V Krishnan, Country Manager, MySpace India/ Fox Interactive Media, said, “Along with social networking, MySpace is also a repository for the photos and videos taken while on vacation. Many users choose to share the memories immediately rather than wait till they return home.”