Who Reads Technology Blogs? A Dirty Analysis of Reader Demographics

What's the typical audience composition for a Technology blog? We didn't know, so we vowed that we would move mountains to find out. But several months with a shovel in the Sierra Nevadas produced little in the way of usable data. And so we moved on to Plan B, and sought out the services of the Quantcast website metrics gathering service.

Quantcast's Data

We will discuss Quantcast's model in greater depth later this week, but ithere are two key things you need to know. First, it grabs raw metrics directly from the site. That is to say, from some sites. You can opt in to be measured directly by embedding a snippet of code, and Quantcast will measure every click on your domain. The company calls these 'Quantified' sites, and there are a few million of them.

Secondly, the company publishes demographic breakdowns of website readership along gender, ethnicity, income etc. Quantcast only publish figures on U.S. demographics, and so our figures profile only the reader which hails from the United States. Demographics figures are based on panels, Census data and so on, all of which is bundled into an elaborate Mass Inference Algorithm. How good is is the model? The jury's still out, but right now it looks like the best we got.

Sample Size

In our analysis we looked only at Quantified websites only and disregard all others. We'd like to have done fifty, but there just aren't all that many Quantified websites with the slant we wanted, and which attract significant audiences. Then there are a lot of Quantified sites we'd have loved to profile but which have only partial data displayed (eg Techcrunch). So we've surveyed 11, across a wide range of fields.
Based on uncertainties regarding Quantcast's demographics modeling and a small sample size, we describe all that follows as a dirty analysis. But, we think, a good baseline which paints an interesting picture of just who reads Information Technology and Internet technology blogs and news websites. And how they differ from other readership groups.

What's a Technology Blog?

But before any of that, we had to define what a Tech. blog is. When we say Tech, for our purposes we mean Information Technology, hardware, software, Internet technologies and Web publishing. We drew the line at Gadgets, so Gizmodo and co. were ignored. When we say blog, we use the term loosely, and include more traditional magazine-based resources like ComputerWorld.com. If it's a Website where you go to primarily to read technology articles, and there are new articles being produced on a regular basis, that's good enough for us.

After crunching the numbers, this is what we got:

Joe TechBlogReader

• 63.2% of visitors come from the USA

• Visitors Average Page Views per Visit (PVV) = 1.89

• Gender: 64.2% of visitors to a technology blog are Male. 35.8% are Female

• Age:
  18-24 = 11.8%
  25-34 = 18%
  35-44 = 15.8%
  45-54 = 18%
  55-64 = 22.4%
  65+ = 13.3% **

• Reader Income
  $0-30k = 17.60%
  $ 30-60k = 30.09%
  $ 60-100k = 29.18%
  $ 100k+ = 23.7%

• Ethnicity
  84.1% Caucasian
  6% African American
  4.1% Asian
  4.5% Hispanic
  2.3% Other
  

• Addiction rates:
  'Addicts' are those who visit 30 times a month or more. The median score for the amount of Addicts for our surveyed websites was <1%. However, even 1% of addicts tended to contribute anywhere between 16% and 23% of total visits.

When all is said and done, we reckon Joe TechBlogReader looks like this guy:

Who Reads Technology Blogs? A Dirty Analysis of Reader Demographics

\nWhat's the typical audience composition for a Technology blog? We didn't know, so we vowed that we would move mountains to find out. But several months with a shovel in the Sierra Nevadas produced little in the way of usable data. And so we moved on to Plan B, and sought out the services of the Quantcast website metrics gathering service.\n

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