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.

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[Mercurius]

So you're saying EN World is a sausage party? ;-D

 

[Ezequielramone]

How much from Argentina?

 

[Wicht]

I am somewhat heartened by the age demographic. I would have thought that I was in the middle of the graph at age 42, but it seems that EN World has more younger players involved than I had thought.

Though that also means that the RPG experience I take for granted as the norm is no longer the norm, but rather, we have more and more who were introduced to the game via later editions.

 

[Wicht]

Which makes me wonder if I can officially count myself as a grognard.

 

[Redthistle]

Which makes me wonder if I can officially count myself as a grognard.

Yes, you can. In fact, now that I've reached a certain age graphic, I no longer need my Geezer Training Wheels. You can have them for free.

 

[theSim]

6% of females only? Apparently my current rpg group defies the power of statistics!

 

[pedr]

I don't entirely understand Google's analytics, but is the information Google's guesses as to age, gender, etc (based on aggregates of what people of particular ages, genders, income groups etc tend to search for and view on the web) rather than accurate information about each web user? In which case there may be under-guessing of the number of female visitors, if (as is likely) Google uses interest in tabletop hobby games as evidence that a particular web user is male.

 

[Morrus]

I don't entirely understand Google's analytics, but is the information Google's guesses as to age, gender, etc (based on aggregates of what people of particular ages, genders, income groups etc tend to search for and view on the web) rather than accurate information about each web user? In which case there may be under-guessing of the number of female visitors, if (as is likely) Google uses interest in tabletop hobby games as evidence that a particular web user is male.

Here's the documentation on Analytics data:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2799357

It's an estimate based on anonymized samples and user behaviour. It's not 100% reliable, and yes - you could be right in that Google "profiles" visitors to tabletop RPG sites as male, skewing the data. It's the best data we have, though.

 

[Louis Brenton]

I am somewhat heartened by the age demographic. I would have thought that I was in the middle of the graph at age 42, but it seems that EN World has more younger players involved than I had thought.

At age 43, I'm also very encouraged to see how big the age demographics younger than myself are. In light of the many technology based forms of entertainment available today, I'd have thought that my age group & older, original D&D players from the 70s & 80s, would be the biggest group by a large margin.

I'm really curious how many in the youngest demographic were introduced to rpg's by their gamer parents, as I'm doing with my sons right now. I wish there was a way we could know that.