We have been using Lookery.com, the service Scott Rafer founded after he sold MyBlogLog to Yahoo, for almost two months now to get a little more data about you and we like what we see!
According to Lookery more than 37% of our readers are female and the majority of our visitors are between 18 and 24 years old/young.
Should this influence our blogging? Of course! It is important to know who you are writing for. So what should we change? How do you write for 18-24 women? What are 35-44 year old men interested in?
Another question: is Lookery right? Is the collected data correct? Lets find out!
[poll id="5"]
Don’t write for your audience, write about stuff that you find both interesting and are good at. Rockstars don’t care about their audience, they care about their music.
Good point! Added a “None of the above…” option…
I’m (unfortunately) not under 18 anymore, but if I were, I would still be reading your blog, and would not be able to select my age..
I’m flattered that you thought I was an original in saying that :-)
Sigh! Us old guys are few and far between.
Interesting proposition, to write or not to write for an audience? On a journalistic note, I feel this is the essential difference between blogging and the mainstream more consumer-focused press. Well done bloggers for proving you can write from your passion and still be read. But moneywise, can you afford to ignore your audience?
As editor of thenextwomen.com I’d take the slightly nuanced view of ‘write not for the audience but with the audience in mind’. We are very aware we are writing for a primarily female audience, so the majority of pieces have to fit our mission of making women ‘notable and quotable. In my experience women like stories, they connect through emotion, and they like pieces they can comment on. That is a generalisation of course, really.
So how DO you write for the 18-24 category of women? if 37 % of your audience are women, sounds like you are doing a good job!
As we built the service, we thought very hard about how to be responsible netizens. We decided, even though our profile are strictly anonymous, that it’s appropriate to only include information on adults (18+) in our system.
Linde,
Assumptions are dangerous. Unless you are running Lookery on thenextwomen.com, how do you know what the demographics of your readership are? I bet your guesses are good, but facts are better.
Scott
hear hear! we should translate that mantra into a cool art piece and hang it on the wall here. Because every once in a while, I tend to forget that you’ve just gotta do what you think is right. That was also the main message of Loren Feldman during BLOG08