Who Are You? Reader Survey Results

Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to fill out my first reader survey--all 407 of you. I had been watching the database as the answers came in, and the percentages seemed fairly stable throughout, so I closed the poll this morning and you'll find the results below.

Demographics

You'll see that the readers who filled out the survey were overwhelmingly men, and generally not ancient graybeards like me. I continue to harbor some dim hope that more readers are actually women and they, for whatever reason, don't take surveys as readily as men. Perhaps next year I'll do the ages so we can get a sense of the split of people over and under 40. I asked what your connection to beer was, and people could check any description that fit. I was really surprised and pleased to see that 40% of you homebrew. No surprise that two-thirds call yourselves avid fans (just a few are casual fans), and about a third of you work in the industry.

Perhaps fifteen percent of you filled out the suggestions box, and many of you requested less focus on my home region. If you look at the geographical distribution, however, you'll see why I do it: half my readers are from the Pacific Northwest. That's actually good news--it used to be north of 80%. Finally, no surprise, half of you are referred via social media. I'm pleased to see about a third of you also come here directly.

Content Preferences

I was most surprised by the interest you expressed in different topics. Most of you heeded my request to avoid giving neutral answers to a list of the different types of blogs I regularly post. Far and away the most popular subject is "the culture of beer." This is an interest of mine and it has a fairly specific meaning in my mind, but seeing how much more popular it was than some of the other categories, it makes me wonder what you thought I meant. (I figured it would be the least popular.)

For each item, there were two increments of approval and two of disapproval. Those data were captured in the database as either -2, -1, 0 (neutal), +1, +2. I fiddled with the numbers a bit and looked to see if any of the categories had a weird distribution (they didn't), and just totaling them up seemed the most useful. Even the least popular category (and one of my favorites!), European and foreign beers, was still well into the positive range. (With 407 survey results, that means any single category had a theoretical range of -814 to 814.) Only 18% of you actively don't like seeing posts about European beer, which is good, 'cause you're gonna see 'em.

This was quite useful, and again, I really appreciate the time you all took to help me out.