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?
