Blogger Statistics: a quick look.

Just a quick post with none of my usual rambling and for once I am being far more succinct, in other words, like my blogging over this year I’m half-assing the post. 😉

I often think that I’m old (39) to be a blogger and, that as a male that I’m in the minority too. So, I put out a trio of polls on Twitter to sate my curiosity, to look into my thoughts and to see if my presumptions were proven correct or if I was wrong. Now, of course, there are many variables that need to be taken into account, there will be discrepancies, variables at play, the polls are only rudimentary, the results aren’t infallible and they only show a small snapshot of blogging as a whole, but I was intrigued to see the results and due to that, I have created this post to share them with you too.

I’ll look at the blogger age first. To start with the original poll that I ran received 367 votes with the age ranges of under 18 yr, 18 – 35 yr old, 35 – 50 yr old and 50+ as the categories.

Below you can see the chart with the full poll results:

The two categories with the most votes were the 18 – 35 yr old and 35 – 50 yr old age ranges that received a combined percentage of 90% of the total number of votes. 90% is a huge number, absolutely huge, a massive majority and honestly, I was quite surprised by this as I had thought that there were a lot of bloggers under 18, but they polled only 1% of the total votes. Taking the two highest age ranges and putting them together creates an 18 – 50 yr old range which is a very wide margin and a large age gap and so, I decided to delve deeper with a second poll looking specifically at that age range. For that poll, I chose the age ranges of 18 – 24 yr old, 25 – 34 yr old, 35 – 44 yr old and 45 – 50 yr old.

Below you can see the chart with the full poll results:

This time 421 people (the largest amount of participants) took part in the poll and the category with the most votes was the 25 – 34 yr old age range with 47% of the total vote followed in second place by the 35 – 44 yr old category with 23% (which is the age range that I find myself in). While I’m not in the category with the highest percentage, I am in the second-highest category percentage-wise and well, I guess that I’m not that old to be a blogger after all! 🙂

The last poll, well, it was the first that I created on Twitter, but I decided to leave it to the end of this post as the result was far more obvious is looking at the gender of bloggers. I guess that if we think about it then we all know that blogging is female-dominated and the question regarding male and female bloggers is simply how big is the female majority? Scrolling through the blogs that I follow it is often a female blogger followed by another female blogger by another female blogger and so on with a few male bloggers interspersed in-between all of the female bloggers. Likewise, my Twitter feed (it is the same for the few blogger groups that I am a member of on FB too) is often mostly full of female bloggers with a few male bloggers popping up here and there on my timeline.

While there are male bloggers it has to be said that compared to female bloggers there are fewer males, far fewer males and the result of the poll that I ran really bring this home.

The poll that I ran on blogger gender received 296 votes (the smallest number of participants) and the categories were Male, Female, Non-binary/Transgender and Prefer not to say.

Side note: I just want to clarify that I am aware that there is a difference between Non-binary and Transgender, but Twitter only allows four options in a poll and I wanted to include an option that allowed people to decline to not to say what gender they are. So, no offence was meant by putting Non-binary and Transgender together, we good? Good.👍📚

Below you can see the chart with the full poll results:

The results show that 70% of those who voted are female and that is a massive majority. It’s not surprising that the poll showed a female majority, it was to be expected, but I didn’t expect it to be quite so high. Male bloggers made up 25% of the total votes in the poll and Non-binary and Transgender had an even lower percentage of only 3% of the total votes. I’m a straight white male, the privileged devil to many of you and as such, I don’t feel comfortable commenting on the Non-binary and Transgender percentage in the poll only to acknowledge how low it is. However, I will write that blogging is a very diversified, welcoming, all-encompassing and inclusive community and I’d like to think that if another blogger (who comes from/identifies with that part of the community) were to run a similar poll, to mine then the percentage on their own poll would undoubtedly be far higher than it was on my poll (at least, I would hope that it would be).

For me, as a male and the reason that I ran the poll in the first place, my own curiosity. Well, 25% out of 296 people who voted are male and 70% are female, that is a huge gap and a chasm between the amount of male and female bloggers! For whatever reason, male bloggers are a minority and we need more of them.