---
title: "53,651 male, youngish, rich, powerful and geeky readers"
date: 2006-05-14
author: "Richard MacManus"
categories:
  - name: "ReadWriteWeb"
    url: "/category/readwriteweb.md"
tags:
  - name: "2006"
    url: "/tag/2006.md"
---

# 53,651 male, youngish, rich, powerful and geeky readers

There’s been a lot of talk recently about [Josh Kopelman’s post](https://web.archive.org/web/20080704142546/http://redeye.firstround.com/2006/05/53651.html), in which he wrote:

> “As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing **a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience**. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.”

[Paul Kedrosky](https://web.archive.org/web/20080704142546/http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/05/12/the_first_25000.html) and [Om Malik](https://web.archive.org/web/20080704142546/http://gigaom.com/2006/05/13/the-myth-reality-future-of-web-20/) have great follow-up posts. All of this talk actually coincided with my own review of Read/WriteWeb. I’ve been delving into my server and Measure Map stats in an effort to identify what’s been popular on my blog this year – and what topics my readers like the best. Also recently I got the results of the FM Publishing survey I had on my blog — and turned out my results were pretty similar to those of [Techcrunch](https://web.archive.org/web/20080704142546/http://www.techcrunch.com/). Here are [Techcrunch’s results](https://web.archive.org/web/20080704142546/http://federatedmedia.net/authors/techcrunch), with mine in brackets:

Audience: · 89% male (RWW = 84%) · 81% 18-39 (RWW = 71%) · 50% HHI \[household income\] above $75k (RWW = 45%) · 39% Director level or above (RWW = 39%; with 60% being manager level or above!) · 55% IT professionals, developers, engineers, or consultants (RWW = 63%) · 60% publish their own blog (RWW = 68%)

I can tell you that most of the FM blogs have similar stats. Some of them have a more broader audience (e.g. BoingBoing), but there are a subset of FM blogs that have an overwhelmingly male, Gen Y/X, rich, manageriel/executive, IT-based and geeky audience. They include Techcrunch, GigaOm, A VC, Buzzmachine, Read/WriteWeb. The predominance of male readers (and writers) for these blogs is actually pretty worrying and probably sums up how narrow a niche audience this is.

Here are the main summary stats for Read/WriteWeb, from my FM survey:

– 60% of my readers are decision-makers (manager level or above) – 92% are early adopters of technology – 60% are computer professionals or consultants

I take that as meaning Read/WriteWeb is successful in providing the information it sets out to: web/media product analysis, market positioning, industry trends and insights. That’s the kind of information that decision-making early adopting, IT professionals ***need***. So I’m glad I’m providing it. Indeed my challenge now is to get the full 53,651 people who need it, to subscribe to Read/WriteWeb *as well as* Techcrunch 🙂

OK I do wish that the group of ‘53,651’ people was more inclusive (more women, more over 40’s, more non-IT people, etc). That’s something we as an industry need to look more closely at. I know [Susan Mernit](https://web.archive.org/web/20080704142546/http://susanmernit.blogspot.com/), [Dave Winer](https://web.archive.org/web/20080704142546/http://scripting.com/) and others have been keen to have a more inclusive audience, so it’s not as if we’re ignoring the issue.

Any suggestions on what I can do at Read/WriteWeb to get a broader and more inclusive subscriber base? Tone down the geek-techie talk perhaps? More market research-based posts?

*Originally published on ReadWriteWeb ([archived copy](https://web.archive.org/web/20020204040018/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/msn_originals_w.php))*