Thanks for voting yesterday in my readership survey - nearly 1200 of you were kind enough to take part! Now I know how my readership has changed overthelasttwelveyears, but also how very similar it is. One thing that hasn't changed, according to the 2016 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 eight. That's quite some divide, and suggests my blog has a long term gender interaction crisis. I don't believe there are fewer females reading stuff on the internet, so I have to conclude that I'm now frightening (or boring) many of my former female readers away. Perhaps that's due to changes in my writing style, or maybe a perceived evolution in my choice of subject matter. Sorry ladies, I'll try not to lose any more of you. Meanwhile I've noted that eight of you omitted to answer this question, so perhaps next time I should introduce a third category here (whatever that should be called).
Age?
I'm slowly haemorrhaging the younger audience too. Ten years ago a third of my readers were under 30, but now that's barely 15%. Maybe blogging's become a bit old school for the younger generation, who prefer regular status updates to daily thousand word essays. My highest readership has always been amongst 30-somethings, and still is. But the over 50s and over 60s are catching up fast, from more than 10% behind in 2014 to almost equal in 2016. We're all getting older, and more technologically aware, so maybe this upward shift merely reflects the passing of time. Indeed I now find myself two age groups higher than when I started the survey twelve years back, which is a chastening thought. Maybe I need to add a 70+ category next time.
Where do you live? (pick one)
These proportions are surprisingly similar to those seen in previous surveys. Just over half of my readership comes from London - the city I write about the most. About 30% are from the rest of 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 Wanstead, Bow and King's Lynn 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?
Here's a very clear change - you're getting more and more regular in your visits. Back in 2004 only half of you came back every day, then two years ago two thirds of you did, but now almost three quarters 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 what's left of the blogosphere. Statistically speaking it's unlikely that an occasional reader would actually have been reading yesterday, which is one reason the count is so low, but that proportion has also being tailing off of late. And hardly anybody lands on diamond geezer for the first time any more, mainly because Google is no longer so kind to minor blogs like mine, but a special hello to the seven of you who did yesterday.
When was your first visit to diamond geezer?
This graph celebrates the longevity of diamond geezer's readers. About 40% of you claim to have been reading for more than six years, and a sixth of you for more than ten (assuming your memory of that first visit is truly accurate). More and more of you have joined in as successive years have passed, with (I suspect) a significant number drawn here by the Olympics. Meanwhile one in ten of you are far more recent converts, which if nothing else means you have over a decade of diamond geezer archive still to trawl through. Thank you all for sticking around, however long it's been.
How do you usually view diamond geezer?
I haven't asked this precise question before, and the results are highly illuminating. Two thirds of you are reading on a computer or laptop or similar, which is how the blog was originally designed to be seen. Around 15% enjoy the convenience of a tablet, which should be wide enough to be able to read what I've written without major inconvenience. But almost 20% of you are reading on your phone, which is three times as many as two years ago, and confirms the relentless rise of this ubiquitous medium. If my template was even vaguely mobile-friendly, I wonder if it'd be more.
What's the background colour, usually, when you read diamond geezer?
This question mystified a few people, but it's simply my attempt to determine how many people are reading my posts somewhere that isn't on my blog. diamond geezer's traditional background is grey, so if that's what you see when you read, you're probably grappling with my normal template. But if you read the blog via RSS, with much of the formatting stripped away, you get words and pictures with a white background. Various smartphone browsers allow a similar cut-down Reader view. Some think it more convenient to access, some think it easier to read, especially if they're viewing on a screen less than 600 pixels wide. Don't all try it, else my readership will appear to wither away. But it's nice to know that my visitor numbers are probably 11% higher than I think they are.
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 seven. 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 March 2018...
