Bime has just put out an updated visualization that breaks down Google Plus demographics including the month of August, now that the service has had some time to grow. This survey covered 10 million users, more than twice the size of the previous one, and some things haven't changed. About 70% of Google Plus users still identify as men, and the vast bulk of them are American. One major shift has taken place, though: While the updated post doesn't have the age numbers (which came from a different dataset last time), the occupation data show that students have overwhelmingly displaced tech workers, though all the same tech jobs as before dominate the rest of the top spots.

That would seem to totally contradict what Bime found. Bime uses self-reported data from user profiles, though, and this Experian Hitwise study, to the extent it makes sense at all, uses some highly advanced semantic analysis where simple profile fields would seem to suffice. So let's assume that the huge growth in people calling themselves "students" is more believable than the decline in people using a cloud of words some algorithm defines as "student-y."

Two other trends jump out from the new data. User growth is steady and more or less linear week over week, but 83% of users in this study are classified as inactive. Bime doesn't know how this is defined, so we've asked Find People on Plus for comment and will update with the response. Find People on Plus has admitted that its directory can only see public posts, which makes this measurement unjustifiable, and it is renaming this data field as a result. If it's true, though, that means that only 2.5 million people from the sample are really using Google Plus. Furthermore, Bime admits that its own interpretation of the data was unclear. Out of this voluntary sample of 10 million, only 2.5 million are using the service. Neither of these studies seems dependable enough to draw conclusions about overall activity on the service. It was a voluntary sample, though it was still a large one, and the respondents were mostly male students and geeks (which, for the record, is a term of affection at ReadWriteWeb).

Are you on Google Plus? Has your use declined since you joined? Let us know in the comments.

But their profile of the average U.S. gamer varies noticeably from what the Entertainment Software Association found in their 2011 report. The two studies have markedly different measurements of the age and gender breakdown of U.S. gamers.

The PlaySpan and ESA studies had sample sizes of 1,006 and "almost 1,200" respectively. The former was conducted by VGMarket, which concentrates on the video game industry, and the latter by Ipsos MediaCT, a general media, content, and technology research firm. It's not obvious why the two would find such noticeable differences in the average U.S. gamer population. The discrepancy prevents us from drawing any conclusions about spending on virtual currency yet.

Update 8/5, 9:00 a.m.: Commenting on the discrepancy, Michael Gluck, president of VGMarket, says, "In order to qualify for our study, respondents must have purchased at least one virtual good in the last 12 months. This study is all about understanding the average virtual goods buyer, not the average gamer in general. Those who did not purchase virtual goods were excluded from the study." That's not apparent from VGMarket's slides, though. The data in dispute are under the header "US General Gamer Population" (slide 1), and 8% of respondents say they did not purchase virtual goods in the last 12 months (slide 5).

When asked to clarify in light of the seeming contradiction, Gluck repeated his position. PlaySpan's data seem less reliable in light of this conflict.

McKinsey states that "Digital-media junkies" are three times more likely to be early adopters of new technologies. This segment makes up 19% of McKinsey's survey, up 7% from 2008. The "Traditionalists" meanwhile make up 24% of the survey respondents, the same as in 2008. Traditionalists overwhelmingly do not own smartphones. They also have not yet adopted online media devices, such as tablets and e-readers.

Probably the most interesting statistics are in the device ownership section. The Digital-media junkies own more devices than Traditionalists in every single product category. The highest ranking devices for the junkies are game consoles (85%), portable media players (84%) and smartphones (67%).

Just 12% of the Traditionalists own a smartphone. Many probably own so-called 'feature phones' - which are phones that don't connect to the Web, or do so in a very limited way. This tells us that despite the huge growth in the mobile Web market over the past couple of years, there is still a long way to go before about a quarter of the U.S. Internet population can participate in this revolution.

Consuming media online seems almost anathema to the Traditionalists. As noted in the 'media choices' section, they are still large consumers of print newspapers. But for tablets (2%) and e-readers (3%), Traditionalists trail well behind the Digital-media junkies.

Looking further at the media choices section, we can see that the Digital-media junkies are huge gamers: 89% compared to just 23% for the Traditionalists. There are also wide gaps in online video consumption (84% vs. 18%) and social media (82% vs. 32%).

Unsurprisingly, the only media surveyed which Traditionalists use more is print newspapers. 59% of Traditionalists read print newspapers, compared to 46% of Digital-media junkies. The (already well known) implication is that the print newspaper audience is aging and there are less younger readers.

Another stark difference is that the Digital-media junkies are 62% male, while the Traditionalists are 61% female. That could be more of a social issue than a technology one. Perhaps, for example, schools and families should do more to encourage geek girls. Let us know your thoughts on that - and the other statistics in this report - in our comments.

Photo credit: Antonio Viva

The data seem to confirm the popular conception that Google Plus users overwhelmingly identify as male (71.24%). The dominant age bracket (35%) is 25-34. The U.S. is by far the most represented country on Google Plus, with roughly three times the user base as India. The top 10 most common occupations of Google Plus users are dominated by tech jobs, with engineers (1.77%), developers (1.02%), designers (0.82%) and software engineers (0.72%) taking the top spots. And, by a wide margin, the top employer of Google Plus users is Google itself.

Bime pulled most of their data from Find People on Plus, a third-party member directory. They analyzed a sample of 4,412,227 users, which, according to estimates, is probably over one fifth of the entire user base. The age distribution data is from comScore, not from Find People on Plus, so the sample is not the same.

Bime admits that the data is "a few weeks old," so demographics may have shifted. As we noted last week, user behavior on Google Plus appears to be changing. But Bime's dashboard is still probably a reliable picture of who the early Google Plus adopters are.

If this intersection of 3 key social software trends is someday exposed more fully to all 500 million Facebook users and more - the Facebook vs. Google battle could become a fight between Recommendation and Search. Facebook recommendations are in the sidebar for most users today, but they are so powerful that it's worth betting they'll be center stage in the future.

What other website do people tell as much about themselves as Facebook? What other website do people connect as directly with people they know in the physical, off-line world? Facebook's ability to recommend friends that you actually know when you create an account, based only on your email address, is pretty jaw dropping in and of itself. Facebook says the page recommendation is based on users similar to yourself, but these recommendations are surfaced before you fill out your profile information. Facebook is using some seriously magical secret sauce to figure out who your friends might be, then what you might like based on your shared demographics, before asking you anything more than your email, name and age. That's pretty amazing. Presumably they are pinging 3rd party email databases - but that would be an interesting story to dig into!

All these personal details and connections can be cross referenced to create a rich picture of who you are and what you might like. There have been a lot of behind-the-scenes user tracking and profiling technologies developed over recent years - but what can come close to a system people opt-into and tell all about themselves?

Likewise, Facebook has for years been paying very close attention to the click-through, commenting and update-hiding rates of publishers on its platform. If your application gets a good response from users, for example, it's allowed to push more updates out over time. If relatively few people click on your links, then applications see their rate of allowed updates lowered.

Organizations, "brands" and other publishers with Fan Pages that people subscribe to ("Like") have their click-through rates tracked similarly. On the surface at least, it's a pretty straight-forward relationship between user demographics, publishers you're most likely to be interested in and who get a lot of engagement from their current subscribers.

The end result is subscribers for publishers on the Facebook platform and subscriptions for users. RSS never caught on with the mainstream, but Facebook updates have. Subscription to syndicated updates from a potentially infinite variety of niche publishers has long been one of the dreams of the internet. This represents an important upgrade from Facebook's introduction of about 100 suggested Pages to Like in February.

The Google-Battling Power of Recommendations

That Facebook says these recommendations cannot be purchased and are entirely algorithmic is very important. That's an important nod towards the democratizing nature of the system. Another would be if the algorithm privileged some relevant and high-quality but long tail publishers - not just what's popular and successful among similar people. It's hard to believe there won't be some paid option some time in the future.

Recommendation-geeks have argued that recommendation may someday become bigger, more important and more lucrative than search. Recommendation is like a smarter, pre-emptive search before you even thought to search for anything. The richness of the data that this is based on inside Facebook is truly incredible. This could be how the battle between Facebook and Google plays out: as Recommendation vs. Search. User demographics vs. search personalization. Publisher engagement vs. Pagerank. Now what does Google have to offer against Facebook's key feature - the Newsfeed people opt-in to get subscriptions (and ads, basically) pushed in front of them, side by side with baby pictures and friend updates, into the indefinite future?

It's too bad this had to happen under a proprietary platform with privacy problems. These subscriptions people sign up for were turned irretrievably public in the Great Privacy Implosion of last December. The idea of irretrievably public subscriptions is comparable to a requirement that your library book check-out history be printed on paper and nailed to the front door of your house. It's crazy and anti-social. Then, at the last F8 Facebook developers' conference, the company changed this policy and allowed users to make their subscriptions private - though they still default to being public.

None the less, I'm not sure there's ever been a platform in history that knew so much about people, monitored publisher effectiveness so closely and made subscription so easy for so many people.

Get and discuss ReadWriteWeb updates on Facebook here.

The average blogger today falls into the 21- to 35-year-old demographic. Indeed, this group accounts for a little bit more than half of all blog posts in the company's database. Bloggers under the age of 20 account for about 20% of all posts, and bloggers between 36 and 50 account for another 20%. Bloggers over 51 only account for 7.1% of all posts.

Gender

The blogosphere represents a very balanced gender distribution, with women accounting for about 51% of all posts and men accounting for 49%.

Location

The vast majority of bloggers still reside in the U.S. (29.2%), followed by Great Britain (6.75%), Japan (4.88%) and Brazil (4.19%). In the U.S., California plays host to the largest number of bloggers (14.1%), followed by New York (7.16%) and Colorado (5.25%).

These numbers, of course, are skewed, as they don't take the relative size of these countries and states into account. It would be interesting see these numbers on a blogger-per-capita scale.

The statistics released today pertain to the 100 million U.S.-based Facebook users, which comprise nearly one-third of the site's entire user base. They seem to support a continuing trend for Facebook - the slow growth of young and marketable users joining the site compared with their elders. We took a look at the numbers six months ago and most of the indicators seem to be only growing stronger.

Now, a big number to look at before anything else is Facebook's nearly 145% growth in the past year, going from 40 million to over 100 million users since January last year. But where is this growth coming from?

When we last wrote about the graying Facebook population in July, users in the 55-plus demographic had skyrocketed from 1 million to nearly 6 million. This same population has now grown to nearly 10 million, a growth of 922% over the past year. This makes this age group now account for one of every 35 Facebook users. Is the boom in Baby Boomers a problem for Facebook or does it just open up new markets?

It seems that the numbers for users identifying as high school or college students have returned to positive growth, and the overall demographics of the site have remained steady. Despite the explosion of senior netizens on the site, the 55-plus group still make up only 9% of the site's entire user population, just 1% more than the last time we looked.

While the over-55 group has strong numbers, the other demographic groups are still primarily responsible for the site's exponential growth, each increasing by nearly 10 million users over the past six months.

Instead of seeing this as a problem for Facebook, maybe it's just a sign that the site is no longer popular just among teenyboppers and cool college kids. And maybe, just maybe - if we can all figure out the privacy settings - we can all coexist without our parents and grandparents ruining the party.

Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.

Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.

As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males

Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.

Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.

Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)

Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.

Those claims are now being further backed up by the Nielsen study, which, in addition to noting the financial discrepancies, also discovered that many social networking users tend to be urbanites, especially those engaged in blogging and tweeting.

The study examined seven of the most popular social networking and blogging sites including Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, ClassmatesOnline, and LinkedIn. Through the Claritas product, Nielsen segments their online panel of 200,000+ participants into demographically and behaviorally distinct groups which include everything from "Young Digerati" to "Heartlanders." After doing so, they found a notable difference between the two top social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

According to the research, the top third of lifestyle segments relative to affluence (aka the "richest" users) are 25% more likely to use Facebook than those in the lower third. The bottom third segments related to affluence (aka the "poorest") are 37% more likely to use MySpace. Also of note, Facebook users are more likely to use LinkedIn, a site for professional business networking, and again, another factor which points towards the differences in demographics between the two social networks.

Besides confirming the income discrepancies between MySpace and Facebook, Nielsen also discovered that those involved in blogging and tweeting tend to live in more urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. The 12 "Urban" lifestyle groups tracked by the company are more likely to use Blogger, WordPress, and Twitter than the 22 "Town and Rural" segments. However, there was no mention of these groups being more affluent, just more urban.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, teens are more likely to use text messaging than Twitter for keeping up with their friends. Today's teens feel somewhat uncomfortable with the public nature of the communication that takes place on Twitter, and, besides, they just don't see the point in broadcasting what they're doing to the whole world. Yet even without this age group's participation, Twitter has seen amazing success, proving the point that a new technology does not have to be adopted by this young group of users in order to make it big.

Twitter's Youth Sees Growth

Although Twitter didn't attract teens at the outset, that could still change. In fact, it looks like that change may already be underway. A newly released chart from comScore breaks down the age groups of Twitter users and plots each group's growth over time, relative to audience. The most surprising revelation from this chart is the steep incline seen in the age group 12-24. Over the past few months, this group's participation levels have been increasing dramatically.

In reading the chart, a score of "100" means that the age group on Twitter is represented in perfect proportion to how much that age group uses the rest of the Internet as a whole. Go over 100 and that means the age group is represented more heavily on Twitter than they are represented on the rest of the web. In July, those aged 12-24 scored a "121" - a score that was only in the mid-70s a mere six months ago.

Statistics Can be Misleading

But wait - a quick glance at these statistics can be misleading. At first, it appears that the chart simply shows the increasing participation levels of teens (and young adults) on Twitter. While that may be true, it's important to note that the actual number of younger users on Twitter is still much lower than those of their adult counterparts. In fact, the New York Times recently reported that only 11% of Twitter users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore.

Plus, there's the fact that the age group 12-24 represents an odd way of breaking up the demographics. Why not 12-18 instead? The way Twitter's user base is sliced, there's no way to tell how many users are teens and how many are young adults in their 20s.

Finally, the chart is showing audience growth compared to the rest of the Internet as a whole. That's also an interesting way of charting the demographics of Twitter, to say the least.

All that being said, the data seen here is still valuable to some extent. It's interesting to see this market segment's growth, even if it's sliced and diced in this odd way. But does this mean that teens are going to start tweeting sometime soon? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Grandma and Grandpa showed up to have a conversation, but Billy and Sally were gone. Facebook cannot be excited about this.

According to this data, from Facebook's own ad platform, there are actually fewer high school and college users on Facebook today than there were six months ago.

As you can see in the chart above, young people by age are up a small amount, but young people by school level are down. Users with undeclared education levels are way up, implying that many high school and college students may simply no longer be listing their schools at all on the site. That's a dramatic change too for a site that began as a network for college students. We wouldn't be surprised if Facebook stopped showing advertisers the number of high school and college students soon and relied only on the age distribution.

Who is the company that is presenting these historical numbers? A quick check around the web shows that iStrategyLabs is one of the top sponsors of the Apps for Democracy contest with the D.C. government and company CEO, Peter Corbett, as a judge for the Apps for America project with the Sunlight Foundation - those are some pretty good credentials when it comes to saving a set of numbers accurately for six months. The company's spreadsheet of Facebook data it's captured since October, 2007 is here.

Facebook's communication team told us in response to this comparison that those numbers are "rough, not actual" - but they are going to check on the historical numbers internally and get back to us. Given that the number of male users plus the number of female users adds up to a lower number than the number of users shown when no gender is selected in the advertising platform - we suspect that the numbers Facebook is showing its advertisers are very rough. Users cannot create an account without specifying one gender or another.

We can't help but wonder whether the kinds of privacy measures that Facebook is sticking its toe in the water with right now could have helped six months ago: letting messages be made visible only to limited groups of people instead of all messages going to all your Facebook connections no matter the context. Instead, Facebook seems determined to push everyone into making their content on the site more public, not less. That may not matter if the kids aren't around to be upset. Then the advertisers will be left pitching their products to senior citizen late adopters - and 35 to 54 year old users, now the biggest group on the site.

It's not a pretty picture, but we await further response from Facebook.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_own_estimates_show_youth_flight_from_sit.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_own_estimates_show_youth_flight_from_sit.php Social Networks Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:02:57 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Sysomos, a Toronto-based startup, officially launched its two flagship products this morning: MAP (which stands for 'Media Analysis Platform') and Heartbeat. Both products are incredibly powerful (but costly) social media monitoring and analysis tools. In many ways, it is probably best to think of MAP and Heartbeat as companion pieces. Heartbeat basically provides a subset of MAPs features and is somewhat similar to Radian6's social media tools, with a strong focus on making it easy for companies to track social media metrics. MAP, on the other hand, is a far more powerful and flexible analysis tool.

]]> What can MAP do for You?

Maybe the real question to ask is actually: What can't MAP do? MAP gives its users the ability to research any topic on blogs, social media sites, and in traditional news media reports.

MAP can, for example, tell you that the largest number of Twitter users who wrote about the Palm Pre come from California and Great Britain, as well as who the most authoritative Twitter users who tend to tweet about the Pre are (MAP assigns a score from 1 to 10 to every Twitter user, based on the number of followers, replies, retweets, etc.). Of course, you can then also compare these results with results from a query for 'iPhone,' for example.

This video gives a good, quick, overview of what the Sysomos tools can do. Usually these promotional videos tend to be a bit exaggerated, but in our experience, MAP and Heartbeat fully live up to their promises.

But MAP is not just a tool for analyzing tweets. It can also quickly give us a history of when and how often a Wikipedia article was edited, or what the most popular forum posts and YouTube videos about the any given topic were in the last 30 days.

For PR firms, another interesting function is MAP's ability to create a list of the most authoritative blogs (and blog posts) about any given subject. This way, a firm can quickly create a list of blogs to contact about an upcoming launch of a rival phone, for example (for the Pre, by the way, MAP identified CNET and Engadget as the top blogs). Once a firm has identified these blogs, MAP can also provide a detailed analysis of the topics these blogs tend to write about, how many posts per month they publish (almost 1000 per month for Engadget) as well as a list of blogs that tend to link to this blog's content.

On the technical side, Sysomos is obviously doing some very interesting semantic analysis, which, among other things, allows the software to create very cool 'BuzzGraphs' that display the key search term in relation to the most often used terms around it (here is one for 'Conan,' for example). MAP can also do sentiment analyses, which will be really helpful for PR firms who want to track the result of a campaign, for example. Given that MAP users can filter results by time, demographic, or language, the tools allow for some very detailed analysis.

Both MAP and Heartbeat are surfing the current wave of enthusiasm for the real-time web, and MAP's crawlers index an enormous number of blog posts, forum posts, news reports, and tweets every hour. One interesting aspect of Sysomos' backend is also that the company keeps a complete cache of tweets, blog posts, and news reports on its own servers, so that it never has to rely on the availability of Twitter's API, for example. Amazingly, Sysomos also manages to effectively filter out blog spam, which is not an easy feat.

Monitoring the Heartbeat

If MAP is for PR firms and maybe even news organizations who want to be able to analyze the reaction from social media sources about a given topic, Heartbeat is the companion product that firms would probably set up for their clients to use, as its focus is on monitoring specific terms in real-time. Besides giving users an overview of the most recent posts that included a specific keyword (usually a brand name in this context), Heartbeat also tracks data about sentiment, demographics (age, gender, location), and the language they wrote in.

Heartbeat, which comes in a standard and pro version, doesn't feature all the in-depth analysis tools that MAP offers, though both products are based on the same platform. Instead, Heartbeat provides users with an easy to use dashboard, where they can track new blog posts and tweets about a product, for example. Here, users can then also tag specific blog posts and tweets (Heartbeat also automatically assigns tags to every item), and assign a follow-up to other users. The standard version supports up to 5 users, while there are no limitations on the number of users in the pro version.

Intelligence for Social Media

MAP and Heartbeat are highly complex products, and we only got to touch upon a small sub-set of their features (Sysomos also offers Firefox extensions, for example). We weren't able to get a lot of information about the pricing for both products, but Sysomos told us that they work individually with every one of their clients to create the right package for them. However, barring any financial stumbling blocks, we would highly recommend both MAP and Heartbeat to any PR firm that needs a tool to research, monitor, and manage social media campaigns. The more we used these tools, the more we also felt that they could be highly useful for news organizations as well.

While Heartbeat is easy enough to use, MAP is clearly not meant to be used by casual users. It's one of those tools where one can jump in and start doing some basic analysis pretty quickly, but to really get the most out of it, a training session with Sysomos' staff or a detailed look at the excellent introductory screencast and other documentation is definitely necessary. Sysomos' co-founder and CEO, Nick Koudas, gave us an almost 1 1/2 hour long demo of these two products a while ago, and even this was only enough to touch upon the basic features of the products. It is important to remember, though, that neither of these products are geared towards casual users.

Don't Despair: Free Version Coming Soon

When we talked to the Sysomos team last month, they told us that they are also working on a free, consumer-oriented product that should launch later this year. Even if this free tool only includes a fraction of MAP's or Heartbeat's abilities, we can't wait to get our hands on them, because the dataset that these tools would be built upon is unlike anything Sysomos' competitors currently offer.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pro_tools_for_social_media_sysomos_launches_map_and_heatbeat.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pro_tools_for_social_media_sysomos_launches_map_and_heatbeat.php Product Reviews Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:00:46 -0800 Frederic Lardinois According to data compiled by O'Reilly's Ben Lorica, Facebook is currently seeing some very impressive growth outside of the United States. In Africa and Asia, for example, Facebook's active user base grew over 70% in the last 12 weeks, and in Indonesia, Facebook has finally displaced Friendster as the most popular social network.

With regards to the basic demographics on Facebook, women still represent the majority of users (51% vs. 45%), and while younger users still represent the majority of active users on the service, users over 55 are driving most of Facebook's current growth.

]]> Except for the Middle East, Women Rule on Facebook

The fact that women are clearly in the majority on Facebook is, of course, not exactly a new trend.

It is interesting to note, however, that the only region where men are in the majority on Facebook is the Middle East and Northern Africa, where men make up 56% of Facebook's user base and women only represent 35% of all users. Interestingly, though, this region also features the largest number of users who decline to disclose their gender.

Focus on Europe

In some European countries like Germany, where Facebook is only the fourth most popular social network, Facebook is still struggling to gain significant market share, as its slow adoption of local translations allowed other social networks like StudiVZ or XING to become very popular before Facebook was able to make a significant push into these countries. Today, Belgium has more active Facebook users than Germany. According to O'Reilly, however, Facebook's active user base in Germany grew 60% over the last four months.

According to Katrin Mathis, who has been studying the advance of Facebook in Europe, only about 3% of the total population of Germany can be found on Facebook right now, while 30% of all the British and 38% of all the Danes can be found on the social networking site.

Eastern European countries like the Czech Republic (191%), Bulgaria (105%), or Macedonia (95%) are currently seeing some of the most impressive growth rates in active Facebook users in Europe.

Growth in the Rest of the World

Looking at the world's major regions, O'Reilly found that Facebook continues to grow at about 30% in the last 12 weeks. In Asia and Africa, however, Facebook is growing much faster, with growth rates of 73.7% and 86.9% respectively. In Indonesia alone, where Facebook just eclipsed Friendster as the leading social network, Facebook saw the number of its active users grow by almost 240% in the last 12 weeks.

For more demographic data about Facebook, have a look at the embedded presentation from O'Reilly below. Among other things, this presentation includes interesting data for South America and Africa.

Facebook Demographic Trends

View more presentations from oreillymedia.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_goes_international.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_goes_international.php News Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:15:09 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

As a website or blog publisher, you've likely often wondered, "Who is visiting my website?" Traffic stats are readily available, so you already know that your unique visitors are up this week, and average time on-site is holding steady, and you're slowly beating down that ugly bounce rate, but what you don't know is who these people are. Are they social media geeks? Are they stay-at-home moms? Are they 20-something males with an interest in extreme sports?

]]> That's where site-centric research comes in. Using free survey tools like PollDaddy and SurveyMonkey, or research vendors like InsightExpress and iPerceptions, or, fingers crossed, our own Crowd Science Demographics, you can answer that fundamental question, "Who is my audience?"

We're often asked why site-centric demographic data is better than direct-traffic measurement (like Omniture, WebTrends, and Google's) or syndicated panel measurement (like comScore and Nielsen's). The truth is that all three have a place in the audience-measurement landscape. But the site-centric approach has some advantages that deserve special attention.

Site-centric research has two major advantages:

1. Access to the entire site audience,
2. Customized measurement of audience attributes.

Site-centric research is the demographic equivalent of direct-traffic measurement. Publishers simply tag each page of their site with the survey instrument. This means that the sample is selected based on the entire audience, from which a small percentage is invited to participate. This is unlike a panel survey, which does not have access to the entire audience and which can sample among only the small subset of the audience that happens to belong to the panel. With site-centric research, you get a more representative sample of your audience, the ability to conduct research on very small, targeted audiences, and, because of the potential for a greater volume of collected data, the ability to dive deep into particular parts of your site and audience segments.

Complementing greater access to audiences across different websites is site-centric research that executes customized questionnaires. Instead of a "one survey fits all" approach, each survey can be driven based on the category of the site and the context of particular visitors. So, your audience is asked relevant questions, and the data collected is far more valuable to publishers and advertisers alike. Compared with the sophisticated mathematical models that behavioral tracking companies use to infer the demographics and psychographics of Internet users, site-centric research can seem very simplistic. And in some sense, it is, though there is a tremendous amount of value in "just asking," and a lot of theory behind why it works.

Based on this, there are seven reasons why everyone should be thinking about site-centric demographics.

1. Know your audience. These are the folks actually on your site: you need to know them inside and out. Beyond basic demographics are visitor psychographics.
2. Profile who is visiting your site. Traffic stats are only part of the picture. Detailed and accurate portraits of online visitors are worth their weight in gold.
3. Tailor your content and offers. Detailed profiles allow you to customize offers based on who is visiting your site at any given time. Or, you could allocate ad space based on categories, interests, and behaviors.
4. React faster to emerging trends. Because you're getting real-time info, you can spot key indicators early and adjust your messaging and offers accordingly.
5. Ensure your advertising spend is hitting the right target. Whether you're a publisher or advertiser, profiles ensure that you are delivering the right message to the right audience.
6. Increase the impact of your research dollars. Site-centric research is very cost-effective. More importantly, the data is richer and allows you to do more.
7. Develop relevant partnerships. Partners are a great way to broaden your reach, as long as you can show them what you've got.

If any of these reasons strike a chord, maybe it's time to consider what site-centric demographics can do for you: all you need to do is ask.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowd_science_sponsor_power_of_site_centric_demographics.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowd_science_sponsor_power_of_site_centric_demographics.php Sponsors Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:00:00 -0800 RWW Sponsor Last night, Nielsen Online reported that Twitter has now surpassed Facebook and others to become the fastest-growing site in the "Member Communities" category for the month of February. Although Facebook, the world's most popular social network, has more members than Twitter, that's not what this measurement is about - it's about growth. And Twitter is growing. It's growing like crazy.

]]> Twitter's Growth

According to a post on Nielsen Wire, unique visitors to Twitter.com increased 1,382 percent year over year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. This growth earned it the title of "fastest growing member community site," a term that encompasses not just social networks but any online community - even one such as online wiki community Wikia, which, incidentally, came in at number five on the list. Zimbio and Facebook followed Twitter, growing 240 percent and 228 percent, respectively.

Nielsen also reported that the largest age group on Twitter was not college students or teens, but adults from the ages of 35-49. This group comprises nearly 42% of the site's audience at 3 million unique visitors. Twitter is also a popular site for people to visit while at work, notes Nielsen's Michelle McGiboney, as 62% of the combo unique audience accesses Twitter.com from work versus only 35% from home.

Of course, visitor stats to Twitter.com from a traditional web browser don't show a complete picture since the service is also accessible from a number of desktop and mobile clients as well as SMS. In January, 735,000 unique visitors hit Twitter's mobile web site, averaging 14 visits per month and spending an average of 7 minutes per visit. Twitter also had 812,000 unique users sending and receiving text messages in the last quarter of 2008. However, this last stat only took into account AT&T and Verizon cell phones. Within that group, though, there were nearly 240 tweets per person for the quarter.

A Word About These Numbers

Before taking these numbers to the bank, it's worth noting that they are being pulled from Nielsen NetView (U.S. Home & Work), so they're not representative of the service as a whole - they only give us a snapshot of what's occurring there. Also, the demographic chart is annotated with a note that reads "these demographics have insufficient sample sizes" in the 18-24 age group column, which may speak to the overall insufficient sample size of this particular survey, a number which was not reported.

That said, these numbers do seem to confirm what our gut instincts have been telling us for some time. Twitter is apparently not becoming the next big thing with teens and other members of Gen Y, despite rumors to the contrary. The hype surrounding Twitter's connection to the younger generation was even skewered hilariously by Jon Stewart not too long ago on "The Daily Show."

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

It looks like Twitter may be for "old people" after all. Just like Facebook.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nielsen_twitter_was_fasting_growing_community_last_month.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nielsen_twitter_was_fasting_growing_community_last_month.php Twitter Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:01:16 -0800 Sarah Perez