A Comparison of the MGoBlog Survey Results with Quantcast Data
This is a response to the MGoBlog Survey Results diary posted about two weeks ago. I found some of the results surprising, specifically the respondents' reported demographics compared to YouTube Insight demographics of people who watch my uploads. The people who watch my videos are significantly older and more likely to be female than the people who took the survey. Since a large proportion of my views come from embeds on this site, I hypothesized at the time that the survey results were telling us more about the type of people who would take the time to fill out a survey than the blog's actual audience. Having no data to back that up, I replied with a wise crack about mgovideo stealing mgoblog's women and forgot about the subject for two weeks. Yesterday, I started using Quantcast for mgovideo and noticed that mgoblog does too. You can view mgoblog's site summary here: http://www.quantcast.com/mgoblog.com
The survey's first question was "What best describes your gender?" 96% of the survey's participants answered Male. The Quantcast data paints a radically different picture:
The survey's next question was "What best describes your age?" 53% answered 20-30 years. The Quantcast data on the other hand is enough for the blog's audience to be categorized as Older:
The next question was "What is your current state of residence." 50% answered Michigan. Quantcast says only 35.58% of the site's unique visitors are from Michigan.
The survey didn't ask about race but according to Quantcast, mgoblog has a significant number of African American visitors (12%) and almost no Asians (1%) or Hispanics (1%). Compared to U-M's undergraduate demographics (5.8% African American, 12.1% Asian American, 4.1% Hispanic American [source: Wikipedia]), this adds to the evidence already presented that mgoblog's visitors are not mostly current or recently graduated students.
The rest of the survey's questions are related to mgopoints which do not exist and are thus not tracked by Quantcast. The most interesting part of the Quantcast data to me personally was that only 5% of the site's visitors are responsible for 58% of the site's visits. In other words, on a typical day when mgoblog gets 30,000 visits, a core group of just 1,500 users that Quantcast appropriately refers to as addicts is responsible for almost 17,500 of those visits.
While it seems at times that everyone on the board is an addict (c'mon, you know 10 visits would be a light day for you), 95% of the blog's visitors are more casual users. I guess that's why the board is always unanimous about Haloscan being the glory days of mgocommenting and yet there have never been more than about 6 guys on the WLA's UniScorn thing.
I should say that I have no idea how valid Quantcast's data is (younger people may be more likely to block their script with an add-on/extension for example), but the data suggests that there may be some misconceptions about the blog and its audience.
The most interesting part of the Quantcast data to me personally was that only 5% of the site's visitors are responsible for 58% of the site's visits. In other words, on a typical day when mgoblog gets 30,000 visits, a core group of just 1,500 users that Quantcast appropriately refers to as addicts is responsible for almost 17,500 of those visits.
I am already female (and old) but I will try harder to be Asian next time I stop by the site. Or maybe "Other." That seems more doable now that I think about it.
April 25th, 2011 at 10:00 AM ^
My name is TimG, and I'm an Mgoholic.
Hi, TimG
April 25th, 2011 at 11:19 AM ^
...this research. I was very skeptical of that survey's data and this is an effective counter to its conclusions.
My research was not meant to gauge the blog's demographics per say, I felt like those would just be necessary questions to see who was taking the survey. If you are skeptical of generalizing the demographics of my survey to the entire blog, I can understand that.
However, the conclusions I made were based off of the questions asking about the point system and its likelihood to change motivations to post and the content posted. The survey was only posted once, and I'm sure you can argue that only certain people were likely to see the link and take the survey. I do not think this makes my conclusions any less significant, and my recommendations any less valid.
/overly defensive
...through how you got to this conclusion from the data you presented. As far as I can see, none of your questions addressed "opinion based vs. quality based voting" (whatever that is).
The point system does not affect motivation to post on a large scale, but it does largely affect the content being posted. While many Mgoblog members appreciate the value of a point system, they believe that the members and moderators are incorrectly using it because of opinion-based voting (rather than content-based), inflated reputations due to over-posting (quantity, not quality) and the exploitation of such reputations.
If you want to make judgments about how folks achieve high point values (quantity vs quality), you need to study posting and voting totals. For instance, take three high point posters (30K range) and calculate points for posting comments, MGoBoard Forum topics, and diaries (that's your quantity measure) and our net points for up and down votes (quality). Now do the same thing for three posters in the 20K range, three posters in the 10K range, 3 posters in the 5K range, three posters in the 1K range, and three posters in the 0.5K range. Check to see if there are any measurable differences in the quantity/quality quotient within and among these groups.
You can't determine that from an opinion poll posted as a Forum thread (even if you got an impressive 500 respondents).
I see what you are saying. I was more aiming to get an idea of how the community views the moderation, and my conclusions are based off of those insights (a combination of written responses and quantitative data). I did not see a reasonable way to provide the community with the thousands of written responses, so you must trust (or not trust) my conclusions based on my word that I am making them from the majority of expressed opinions.
As for the opinion vs. content-based voting, that is simply how people choose to vote on comments. Votes should be given based on the quality of content, and not because one poster agrees or disagrees with another. This was one of the major insights that was gathered from the written responses. Gathering the data you suggested would be interesting, but while it would measure points from posting vs. up/down votes, it would not measure whether the votes given are opinion or content-based. I would have done this 1) if I had more time before the project was due and 2) if the project actually asked for this. My research was already an above-and-beyond effort for the project assigned, and I figured the community would be interested in its results.
Take the results and their limitations however you like, but I do believe my conclusions and recommendations to be strong, even if they're just from "an opinion poll posted as a Forum thread."
This is not to disregard the OPs data from Quantcast. My demographics may certainly be off based on the likelihood of who could and would take my survey.
If your demographics are that far off, it seems obvious to me that any other results or conclusions that you're making based on them are likely to be equally flawed.
...that you asked for and received written comments. I only saw the screenshots of your poll results and couldn't make the connection between that data and your conclusions.
I have no doubt that people think that voting is based on opinion vs content. If they and you are saying that voting suppresses differing viewpoints, I certainly concur with that but with a caveat. Absent anything to base their opinion on except their own perception, people's views of why something is are very rarely accurate.
I have a hard time reconciling the idea that my point total, for instance, is simply because of quantity of posts. You don't get into the points neighborhood I'm in without having a very high net voting total. This may or may not be evidence of post/poster quality, but, absent posting and voting data, there's no way to really know. So I may think my vote total is because I'm full of insight and wit and others may just think I'm full of shit. The truth lies somewhere in between these two perspectives.
You say you were driven to conduct this research due to a course requirement. Perhaps in addition to satisyfing the course requirement you can take away some other lessons from the experience. First, survey data based on internet polls is notoriously shaky because there's no way to account for and correct for participation biases. Boyz n da Pahokee has pointed out major disconnects between your demographics and overall site demographics, so the most you can say is that you gathered opinion data of a subset of the overall site's users. Second, your use of survey participant comments to make discrete conclusions about how the point system should be adjusted is similarly shaky. The existence of these opinions is beyond dispute, but the degree to which they are held across a broad swath of the MGoUser community is unknown, and the validity of the opinions is untested. Just because some people think something is so doesn't make it an objective fact.
All that said, I admire the effort you made.
"The survey didn't ask about race but according to Quantcast, mgoblog has a significant number of African American visitors (12%) and almost no Asians (1%) or Hispanics (1%). Compared to U-M's undergraduate demographics (5.8% African American, 12.1% Asian American, 4.1% Hispanic American [source: Wikipedia]), this adds to the evidence already presented that mgoblog's visitors are not mostly current or recently graduated students."
I'm not sure I agree with that jump to conclusion. I agree that most mgoblog visitors are not mostly current or recently graduated students, but just because the results don't include a 12% asian viewership doesn't mean that there aren't a significant amount of UofM alums reading the blog. It just means that a majority of mgoblog's visitors are most definitely not current or recently graduated asian students.
All in all, interesting data though. Thanks for sharing.
April 26th, 2011 at 10:16 AM ^
Absent data that suggests non-Hispanic Caucasians and African Americans are much more likely to be sports fans or blog addicts than Asian or Hispanic Americans, I don't think it's a huge jump to assume that if the blog's readership was mostly made up of current and recently graduated students, the site's demographics would be more similar to the undergraduate population. But yeah, it's obviously not rock solid. It's almost a non-issue as far as establishing that users are mostly older since the age data alone is sufficient for that.
I think what it really says is that mgoblog's readership is not demographically representative of current and/or recent students. It would be posdible to have a readership composed, say, of 75% current/recent students and still have certain demographics underrepresented.
An interesting question here is whether, as suggested, and how mgoblog's readership demographics differ from a general breakdown of "sports fans" or "Michigan fans" or similarly impossible-to-isolate populations.
Thanks, this is very interesting. Perhaps a certain demographic is more willing/able/has more time to take an online survey than others. I wish I had access to this information before I started the survey!
Male, 35, Asian (1% woo also Brock Mealer 1% rules), not in Michigan, probably +/- 10 visits per day.
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