[ed.note: Our annual survey is now closed; our sincere appreciation to all who participated — jmm.]
As I noted earlier, the primary reason we do our annual survey is to collect data that advertisers want to know about our audience. And the topics and structure of the questions are chosen with that in mind. Still, there’s a lot of information generated that’s just interesting in general. So I thought I’d share some results that caught my attention. Before I get into that, if you haven’t filled out our survey yet, please do. For an explanation of what it’s so important, see this post from earlier today.
And now on to the numbers!
One of the questions we asked was about investment in different kinds of fuel sources. As you might expect, domestic drilling did not come out too well. About 15% either agreed or agreed strongly the US should increase investments in domestic or off-shore drilling. 98.5% either agreed or agreed strongly in new investment in renewables. Here’s what intrigued me though. A plurality, 46.3% either agreed or agreed strongly that the US should increase investments in expanding nuclear power. And this was the category that got the highest number in “not sure”, 17.4%. Only 36% disagreed or disagreed strongly.
Another question: social media. We asked people which social media services or sites they used. This, as you can imagine, is a big thing for us since it’s one of the big ways that new people find out about TPM. The gist is that a lot more of our readers are using Facebook than Twitter. 68% of our readers say they use Facebook compared to 26.5% for Twitter. And 31% say they use Facebook “a lot.”
Then there’s trust in news sources. We asked a series of questions about readers’ attitudes toward other publications. How often do they read them. How much they trust different news sources and so forth. There’s a lot of interesting data in there. But what jumped out at me was that of all the other news outlets we asked about the New York Times was the one our readers trusted the most by a significant margin. Fully 75% said they trust the Times either “completely” or “a lot”. By comparison only 42% said the same about the Washington Post.
Now on the one hand, no kidding, it’s the New York Times. But with all that’s happened over recent years, both at the Times and with the industry in general, that caught my attention.
25% of our readers say they own an iPhone. 3.5% say they already own an iPad.
