Teens don’t tweet. They also don’t read newspapers or watch TV.

That prognosis is not from a well-researched study with a statistical sample, but from a 15-year-old intern working in Morgan Stanley’s London office. His report has torn up the blogosphere for its candid portrayal of his fellow Gen Y’ers.

What’s wrong with Twitter? The intern, Matthew Robson, says that it costs too much to send text messages to Twitter from a teen’s mobile phone. And then once it’s sent “no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.” (That may change as smart phones with free WiFi connections proliferate.)

ComScore’s numbers back up Robson’s assumptions. In June 2009, only 4.4 percent of visitors to Twitter.com were younger then 18.

Robson’s mates also don’t read the newspaper (no surprise there). But it gets worse. Most teens “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text,” he says, and would rather see summaries online or on television.

This presumably should be good news for advertisers who are moving in increasing numbers to the Web. Not so fast, Robson says. Teens find advertising “extremely annoying and pointless,” he writes.

Where do teens spend their money? Movies, concerts and video game consoles.
 
Moving beyond teens, though, lots of other Internet users are tweeting. Twitter.com passed the 20 million unique mark in May according to ComScore, up 14 percent from May. Page views were up 21 percent. And this covers just visits to Twitter.com – estimates are that up to 50 percent of Twitter’s usage occurs via desktop and mobile clients.

Around the world, Twitter has about 37 million visitors a month.