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Who’s on the web? And where are they?

- August 25, 2011

Jake Hofman gave a fascinating presentation the other day on his work with Irmak Sirer and Sharad Goel on the demographics of web users. Here’s their paper, which is full of fun physics-style graphs. For some reason they rotated Figure 5 90 degrees which makes it hard to read; a better alignment and further discussion are here.

And, in case you’re too lazy to click through and read the article, here’s their abstract:

To what extent do the online experiences of, for example, men and women, or Whites and African-Americans differ? We address such questions by pairing web browsing histories for 265,000 anonymized individuals with user-level demographic data–including age, sex, race, education, and income. In one of the most comprehensive analyses of Internet usage patterns to date, we make three broad observations. First, while the majority of popular sites have diverse audiences, there are nonetheless, prominent sites with highly homogeneous user bases. For example, Fox News attracts millions of visitors each month, yet has an audience that is more than 90% White. Second, although most users spend a significant fraction of their time on email, search, and social networking sites, there are still large group-level differences in how that time is distributed. For example, women spend a third more of their time on Facebook than do men, and aside from such universally popular destinations, the top sites frequented by different groups are relatively distinct. Finally, the between-group statistical differences enable reliable inference of an individual’s demographic attributes from browsing activity. We thus conclude that while the Internet as seen by different demographic groups is in some regards quite similar, sufficient differences persist so as to facilitate group identification.

I suspect that most of the readers of our blog here are male and highly educated–I say this because of the topics we cover and from the names of the non-pseudonymous commenters–but I can’t be sure.

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