Thanks for voting yesterday in my readership survey - more than 900 of you were kind enough to take part! Now I know how my readership has changed overthelasttenyears, but also how very similar it is. One thing that hasn't changed, according to the 2014 survey results, is that the typical diamond geezer reader is still a 30-something male from the London area. Hello if that's you. And here are this year's results in a little more detail.
Male or female?
I'm losing the ladies. In the earliest surveys I had three male readers to every female, later four, but now it's nearly seven. That's quite some divide, and suggests my blog has a long term gender interaction crisis. Are there now fewer females reading stuff on the internet? Or has the content of my writing subtly shifted, so that I'm now frightening (or boring) many of my former female readers away. Sorry ladies, I'll try not to lose any more of you.
Age?
I'm slowly haemorrhaging the younger audience too. My highest readership has always been amongst 30-somethings, and still is. But the 40-somethings have convincingly leapfrogged the 20-somethings, and the 50-somethings have almost caught up. Back in 2004 the under 30s easily outnumbered the over 40s, whereas now they're outgunned even by the over 60s. We're all getting older, and more technologically aware, so maybe this upward shift merely reflects the passing of time. Or maybe blogging's a bit old school for the younger generation, who prefer regular status updates to daily thousand word essays.
Where do you live? (pick one)
These proportions are incredibly similar to those seen in previous surveys. Just over half of my readership comes from London - the city I write about the most. Another quarter are from England, probably with a disproportionate amount from the Home Counties. But one in seven are still from outside the UK, so it can't only be my reports from Uxbridge and Chingford which keep them coming back. I see diamond geezer very much as a non-London-centric London blog, so it's good to see my readership also reflects that.
How often do you read diamond geezer?
You're getting more regular. Back in 2004 only half of you came back every day, but now two thirds of you do. That's comforting because I do try very hard to post something every day for you to read - a frequency which is increasingly rare across the blogosphere. Meanwhile the proportion of readers visiting only occasionally has plummeted, because it's all or nothing these days. And hardly anybody lands on diamond geezer for the first time any more, at least not on the home page where the poll was, but a special hello to the three of you who did yesterday.
When was your first visit to diamond geezer?
This graph celebrates the longevity of diamond geezer's readers. About a third of you claim to have been reading for more than six years, with more and more of you joining in as successive years have passed. But another third of you arrived as recently as 2011 or later, with (I suspect) a significant number drawn here by the Olympics. Thank you all for sticking around, however long it's been.
How do you usually view diamond geezer?
This is my attempt to determine how many people are reading my posts somewhere that isn't my blog, although the results are slightly flawed because yesterday's vote wasn't clickable in certain formats. Overall figures may therefore be an underestimate, although it sounds like RSS is still adding substantially to my readership. Meanwhile smartphone numbers aren't hugely higher than in the last survey two years ago, which might be because my blog's design isn't very mobile friendly, or might be because my four question response options unintentionally overlapped. But viewing via tablet has certainly taken off, with its share of my readership now approaching 10%.
Do you have your own blog?
The proportion of readers with their own blog drops noticeably every time I carry out this survey. Back in 2004 more than half of you claimed to be blogging, but that proportion's now nearer one in six. A substantial number of you either never wrote a blog in the first place, or have given up on producing original long form content in favour of merely reacting to what others have written (via Twitter, Facebook etc). But it's reassuring to know that blogging isn't quite dead yet, and I still have competition from at least 150 of you. I wonder how different things will look by the first week of 2016...
