A Quick Look At EN World's Demographics

I use Google Analytics to track this website's performance, and especially to get some insight into usage patterns and (anonymized aggregate) demographic data. Here's a quick look at the reports for the last month. I grabbed a few snapshots of total users, gender and age demographics, and location data by country. There are no great surprises: traffic is healthy (although this is by no means the best month so far this year - one month had over 450K unique active users), the percentage of female visitors is still terrible low - far too low - and the US is by far the largest single country of origin. That last item is interesting - the amount of non-US traffic has increased a lot across the board over the last couple of years, and while the US traffic has increased in terms of raw numbers, it has decreased by about 15% in terms of percentage share. In other words, there's lots of new traffic coming in from other countries.

​

 

[Morrus]

What percentage of the Germany and Italy origin do you think are US service-members and family stationed overseas (I am one in Italy)?

Very tiny, I would imagine. They're countries of 80 million and 60 million people, respectively. There are about 50K and 10K US military personnel in each respective country - even tourists would be a significantly larger impact (Germany has 2.3 million US tourists each year, and 68 million tourists total).

 

[Nylanfs]

You should be able to pull the language set from the browser. That would give you better native vs non-native visitors.

 

[SunGold]

Morrus, have you guys ever considered dropping a small demographics survey on the front page?

I used to hang out in a subreddit that did an annual demographics survey. A lot of the readers (myself included) enjoyed combing through the results and getting an idea of who else was around.

 

[mflayermonk]

Ok. Now I'm curious. If you are willing to share, I believe you can find out here:

https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated?hl=en

For reasons I fail to understand, Google thinks I'm interested in "East Asian Music" (what?), "Make-Up & Cosmetics", "Hygiene & Toiletries", and "Mobile Phones".

Great link, but according to that I'm not interested in tabletop roleplaying games.

 

[remotenemesis]

I'm a Canadian female in my late thirties, but sometimes read this site from my husband's computer rather than my own (he's got a bigger screen, but mine is portable enough to bring as my DM screen).
Trust me, gaming women are not rare at all. Neither are gaming women rare on the internet. But given the experiences we've (almost) all had, especially over the couple year, many of us tend to keep a lower profile, or stick to groups where we can be ourselves, comfortably.
I love ENWorld, almost always feel comfortable here, and hope to see a better showing of women. I really hope that those visitor stats are skewed, but I can't say for sure that they aren't. I know it's not uncommon to declare as either male or no gender for many women in some forums, depending on the level of comfort, so that may skew the stats.

FWIW my weekend gaming group is 2/5 female.

 

[Manchu2]

Very tiny, I would imagine. They're countries of 80 million and 60 million people, respectively. There are about 50K and 10K US military personnel in each respective country - even tourists would be a significantly larger impact (Germany has 2.3 million US tourists each year, and 68 million tourists total).

Knowing the high percentage of gamers in the military and also recognizing that the the numbers 80 and 60 million are irrelevant to the number that are on this site... basically, what I was suggesting is not the % of Germans/Italians that are US service-members, but the number or percentage of EN World users/visitors categorized as from Germany/Italy that are in fact US persons. Totally different set of numbers.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Yeah I have four regular women locally that attend my groups, and eight guys currently....so 33% female in my current groups. However, of all my players only one of them (not counting myself) frequent ENworld; none of the other players "do" the online forum/news/fan thing. Now, of the women I know one of them (my wife) spends a great deal of time online in RP circles that have nothing to do with anything anyone at ENworld has ever even heard of and I only know those venues exist because I am married to her.

 

[CanadienneBacon]

I wouldn't have guessed 6% female. That totally bums me out, man.

 

[Zaruthustran]

Seems like a lot of folk are questioning Google's assumptions about age.

How about ENWorld run a user survey?

Or: how about a pull from users' own profile data?

 

[aramis erak]

My immediate reaction is to be somewhat dubious about the age-range results. If google is looking at what else we do on the web to determine our age...well, gaming geeks just aren't normal that way.

Problem is, there's no over-arching "uber-general" forum in which to put a poll where most forum visitors will see it.

If, as it appears to be, it's running vBulletin, a systemwide announcement is easily done via the Administration Control Panel. A link therein to a poll would show up in every forum on the board. I suspect one could even merge a poll into it, but I've never tried it on COTI.