p2pnet news | P2P:- At the beginning of the month, “to keep on keeping on, p2pnet has to expand and to make that happen, obviously there has to be steady income from somewhere,” I posted, going on:

“And that somewhere has to be advertising. I’d rather not, but I have a family as well as a site to support, so it’s necessary —- not that I have anything against advertising per se. It’s been around forever. What I don’t like are tricky, intrusive ads which treat us like we’re idiots, and we’ll have none of that here.

“I’m planning on using advertising income to do things such as hire at least one other person to help me. (And two would be even better )”

I also introduced Ken Baron (that’s him on the right with his daughter, Blair), an experienced advertising professional who’s now looking after p2pnet ad sales.

“Like me, he wants only ads for products and services a p2pnet visitor such as you would care about,” I said. “So not just anyone will be allowed to advertise on p2pnet.”

I asked p2pnet readers to fill in a short survey to give Ken information on who visits p2pnet, and fair is fair. You provided the data, so you have a right to know exactly what it is.

Cheers! And thanks …
Jon

Here’s Ken >>>

Now we know who you are. Kind of

To all 805 (Yes, that many) of you who took the time to complete the Visitor Survey, thanks. You proved all the work we do to bring you the unspun news is appreciated. And to those who also included comments (even the two flames), thanks also for not only giving us valuable ideas, critiques and suggestions, but for confirming p2pnet.net has visitors who care about how the truth has become a casualty of corporate media.

First, let’s survey the world of surveys.

One of the fundamental fallacies of market research is that surveys such as this one can present a clear, defined picture of the typical consumer who uses a specific product or service. One can infer from this myth that a reliable composite can be drawn from aggregating the responses of 500 or 1,000 or even 10,000 consumers. But the truth is, all surveys are fallible, in some cases remarkably so.

For example, despite Coca-Cola’s testing its New Coke in the mid-80’s on tens of thousands of lip-smacking, thumbs-up, approving consumers before releasing the it to the world at large to enjoy, after one collective sip, the rest of humanity more or less told Coke what to do with their new drink.

A current though no less illustrative example of consumer research’s lack of precision is the polling results from the on-going and seemingly endless primaries —- Barack Obama wins Iowa though virtually every poll said he wouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t, then Clinton snatches New Hampshire despite Obama’s comfortable (and vaporous) lead in the polls there.

If sophisticated polls canvassing tens of thousands of people are rife with inaccuracies which contribute to market researchers making erroneous or incomplete conclusions, how can p2pnet.net have confidence in the results garnered from our own quick survey? After all, no one answering it had sworn under oath to answer honestly.

First, we asked p2pnet.net visitors like you to answer a few questions about something you care about, because we assume you do care about p2pnet.net and the kind of uncontaminated news it delivers, otherwise, why would you be here in the first place? In other words, you like the site enough to keep coming back which also suggests you gave honest answers.

The second reason deals with the consistency of the answers, which statisticians look for when they’re judging if a poll’s results are accurate. As we tabulated the responses of each day, the same percentages showed up, which more or less verified their accuracy.

So here’s what we found out >>>

Key findings - p2pnet.net 2008 Visitor Survey:

Most of our visitors, around 7 in 10 of you, are in your late 20’s to early 40’s. We have many young visitors, under 21, and about one in ten is 56 or older. But most of you fall in the 20’s, 30’s and early 40’s range.

Three out of 4 are male. But based on the number of emails we get from women, we suspect there might be a higher percentage of ladies visiting p2pnet.net. So we’re going to work on ways to attract more female visitors and any ideas you can give us in that regard would be much appreciated.

Interestingly, the income level of p2pnet.net visitors is probably the most varied category, and that’s probably because about a quarter of you are students (from middle school through post grad). That explains why a third of visitors earn $30,000 or less a year. On the other hand, around 4 in 10 earn between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, and one-fifth earn $75,000 to $150,000+ (that last figure claimed by only a handful of respondents, with most in this group in the $75,000 to $100,000 range).

We didn’t ask for each of you to supply the exact amount you earn but instead offered a range, so it’s impossible to calculate an accurate median income. But we can say more than half of p2pnet readers earn between $30,000 and $100,000 a year. That’s a broad spectrum of incomes, but it shows many visitors earn above the US national average, which isn’t surprising considering most of readerss (who aren’t students) work in the communications, media and entertainment industries.

About 5% of you are lawyers, and more than 10% of you are educators.

While the demographics vary, most of you share a curiosity about the world and an appreciation of a news source that tries its best to present it with an unvarnished truth. That’s why so many of you, more than 4 in 10, visit p2pnet.net every day (and 5% say they visit our site every hour!). A quarter of you are here on a weekly basis, and less than 3 in 10 of you visit monthly.

These frequency-of-visits numbers prove you like p2pnet.net. But until we tallied the survey results compiled from the 805 responses, we had no real sense of how much, so to speak. It’s really good to know, and it’ll spur us to continue improving p2pnet.net.

We knew from the various metrics used to measure site activity which sections garner the most visitors - News, RIAA News, P2P, and Freedom being among the most popular.

But then we overlaid the demographics of visitors to the sections they chose and found these sections are popular across the board, by all age, educational, income and type of employment levels.

This reinforces the fact that most p2pnet.net visitors are here because, no matter what their salary or age, they’re looking for an alternative to canned, heavily spun corporate news that fills the Net, TV, radio and newsstands.

When we asked you to take the survey, we promised personal information such as email addresses or names would never be given to a third party.

That still holds and will always be the case.

We also said survey results would be used by us to show potential advertisers who our visitors are - their age, income, education, job type and other demographic factors marketers look for when they’re deciding where to place their marketing messages.

So once again, thanks for all your help. It’s invaluable and Jon and I really appreciate it.

Ken Baron

Slashdot it!

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Advertising, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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