Demographics: Comics Readers Almost 45% Women Now and How Publishers Stack Uphttp://ift.tt/1bjwQBh
At the beginning of each month I take a survey of all of the self-identifying comic fans on Facebook, looking at the changes from month to month. Two months (and some change) ago Facebook updated the interface I achieve this by, giving me more options in how to choose and, I suspect, expanding the algorithm it uses to determine the audience for the terms used.
In October, the study returned 12 million individuals from the 65 terms I used. Those terms were mostly publishers and things like “comics” or “graphic novels.” In November, the first time I used the new interface, the audience increased to 19 million individuals. The terms were the same, only the interface was different. The results returned were a bit different as well. Women, who accounted for almost 41% of fans in October, had jumped to 45.45% of fans. I ran the report multiple times over a few days and got the same result. I didn’t report on it, because I thought it was a glitch in the matrix.
Now, we come to December and I ran the same terms from November, now the number of “comic fans” on Facebook has jumped to 22 million. I then adjusted some terms, adding new ones in mostly and that amount of 22 million stayed consistent. As of December 1, women account for 44.55% of those self-identified individuals. Two months in a row with similar results, so I feel pretty good of putting that as the new benchmark. We’ll see what January brings and if it stays consistent and if it does, I’ll feel much more confident in that result.
But, I’ve been busy and took a request. When I last reported on how indie comics stacked up in all of these stats, I had a request to see how each publisher does and groups of publishers. Well, I completed that first part of the report, but I’m reaching out to you the readers to determine that second part. Below is all of the publishers I could find through my method.
Here’s the breakdown of below data:
- Total – this is the amount of people listed by Facebook for that term
- US Total – the above amount, but in the United States (% is that of the US/Total)
- Men – The amount of individuals who mark themselves as men in the US (% is that of Men/US)
- Women – The amount of individuals who mark themselves as women in the US (% is that of Women/US)
I have also color coded the results:
- Green – Publishers where women are a majority of their Facebook fans in the United States
- Yellow – Publishers where women are not the majority, but are greater than our result from my latest Facebook Fandom study of all of comic book fans.
Now, we can’t just add up numbers to determine the segments suggested in the comments, since the audience would overlap. So how would you break down these publishers for example mainstream/corporate, mainstream format, big publisher, alt, classic publisher, etc. If we come up with some good ideas, I’ll run all of that for the next report!
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