Previous - Blog Archive - Next
Reader Survey Summary, Part 1
March 29, 2010 - Monday
Alright, the survey results are in. We had 628 people complete the survey, so a big thank you to everyone for participating. Around 4000 people visit this site each day, and I only know a small percentage of you from those that either leave comments on the site, spread the word on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, or those that buy products. This survey was helpful for providing me get a better picture of who my audience really is. I hope you all also enjoy learning about your fellow Calamities readers. There's enough interesting details that it'll take me two blog posts to summarize it all. Hopefully you don't find this to be too narcissistic.
What is your gender/age? You readers are predominantly male, with 78% male and 22% female. Furthermore, 43% are males between 18 and 34. So girls, if you're looking for some eligible bachelors, this might be a good place to find guys! Here's a bar graph summarizing the results:
Describe your highest level of education You are generally well-educated, with 74% holding the equivalent of a bachelor's degree or greater and 27% with a masters or PhD. I don't know how this compares to general users of the internet (who are probably more educated than the average citizen), but I don't mind flattering myself with the idea that my audience is pretty smart. I better start making some intelligent comics!
Where do you live? You are 60% from the US, 21% from Europe, 11% from Canada, and 8% from other countries. The majority of the readers from other countries are from Australia.
Which is your favorite Calamities of Nature character? This was a runaway win for Aaron with 43% of the vote. I was a little surprised by this because I've always worried that he was a little too snarky and sarcastic for some people. You can see the rest of the character voting below:
Among the remaining characters, I was also surprised to see Harold so far below Ferdinand. Is it possible that Harold is just too whiny for most people's tastes?
Describe how you read Calamities of Nature The breakdown was 53% from the website, 39% from the RSS feed, and 8% from email. There were a number of interesting details I noticed about this question as the results were coming in. First, when the survey first went up on a Thursday, the RSS feed was overwhelmingly winning. This indicates that my RSS feed readers check the site each day, while the website readers mainly come by when the comic updates. Second, a higher percentage of RSS feed readers completed the survey (out of the total number of RSS feed readers I have) in comparison to the percentage of website readers who completed the survey (out of the total number of returning website visitors I get). This probably indicates that the people coming to the website to read the comic often don't scroll down to read the blog, while RSS feed readers always see the blog updates because it's part of the feed. I found this especially interesting because there seems to be an assumption out there that RSS feed readers are less invested than people that come to the site, when in fact the converse may be true.
If you use an RSS reader, would you be willing to put up with ads below the updates? This is something I've been thinking about doing for a while, but have avoided because I didn't know how people would react. Happily for me, only 31 (or 5%) of the survey takers said no. Therefore I will probably testing some ads later this week. Thanks to you for being understanding and putting up with a small annoyance so I can better support this comic.
How many time per week do you visit Calamities of Nature? Not surprisingly, the most popular answer was 3 times per week, with 26% of the responses. The next most popular answers were 5 times per week (which makes sense because many people do their internet surfing at work) and 7 times per week, both with 14%.
Okay, since this is running long I'll be back tomorrow with more results.
 |  |  |  |  |  |
