There’s been a lot of talk recently about Josh Kopelman’s post, 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 and Om Malik 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. Here are Techcrunch’s results, 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, Dave Winer 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)