I'm an Internet strategist for a firm in NYC, and a long-time web wonk.
Recently I've been doing research on social networks and community sites, and as I pulled market research on sites like Salon.com and Nature.com, I also pulled some research on Dailykos.com, just out of curiosity.
Here's a summary of some of what I found. It's survey research, so I don't vouch for it's accuracy, but I've found it to be generally true about most Websites I research.
Most of it really shows the power of Dailykos, but a few things to me are mind-boggling.
Traffic has almost doubled this year since 2007--hey, no shock there, right?--but are 60% of us over the age of 55? Here's more:
There's proprietary research I can't publish, but if you look at the profile for DailyKos.com at Quantcast, a free Internet market research site, here are some general numbers:
Traffic is up almost 100% since last December, to just over 10 million visits per month. And page views are 20-25 million a month, about 2.3 pages per visit.
These 10 million visits come from approximately 1.2 million unique visitors, meaning the average visitor comes about 9 times a month.
However, if you look closely atthe latest figures for DailyKos at Quantcast you'll see that there's a hard core "addict" group of 19% of visitors who visit more than 30X a month--and produce 80% of the visits.
(Okay, I admit it, I'm RJ and I'm a DailyKos addict...)
Here's a suprise to me: If you click on the "Demographics" tab on the Quantcast study, you'll see that they claim 60% of us are over the age of 55, which I find mind-boggling. Can this really be true? Quantcast rates the "trust-worthiness" of its research from 1-5 and they claim their numbers about the DailyKos audience are a 5--at the top.
If you look at all visitors 45+ years of age that makes up 80% of all Kossacks. This is a little mind-bending for me, so I've added a poll at the end, and ask you to contribute to a small snapshot of us, at least on a sun-shining weekend when most of us are or would rather be outside.
All the other stats quoted by the Quantcast study seem plausible to me--60% male, 82% with some college--but the age analysis is surprising to me.
Full disclosure: I'm 54 years old, and most of my friends who visit and contribute to this community are around my age, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. I just figured the college age cohort would be 20%+.
The age of any of us truly means nothing to me--you're as young or old as you feel--but this research didn't fit my mental model. So my curiosity is piqued. In the name of community market research, I want to ask: