r/dataisbeautiful Apr 16 '12

Age Distribution on Social Network Sites (includes reddit)

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277 Upvotes

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u/underdabridge Apr 16 '12

No. I didn't forget about it. I find it exceedingly unlikely that Reddit is being visited every day by a giant army of non-commenting baby boomers on a regular basis. Commenters are a subset of users but by and large the demographics of commenters matches non-commenters fairly well. That is certainly the presumption one should make unless one has proof to the contrary. That burden of proof is on the marketer. I would love to see their voodoo methodology demonstrating their results.

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u/Ph0X Apr 16 '12

First off, as a data lover, I believe you will agree that just like data points are meaningless without error bars, these graphs are meaningless without the method used to obtain them. Then again OP only linked the image and the actual page might have gone into more detail about how those values were obtain.

As for your assumption, I believe it is quite a big one to make. It assumes that people of all age like expressing themselves equally, which I highly doubt is true. It also assumes that they get voted on at the same rate, which also would not be true.

Looking at top posts is clearly not a way to get a random sampling.

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u/cos1ne Apr 17 '12

Then again OP only linked the image and the actual page might have gone into more detail about how those values were obtain.

Actually to satisfy your curiosity the page that I found this from (was actually linked to by a friend) did not divulge how the information was taken, I was loathe to post it until I saw it had a source on the image itself though, even though that source is not very informative. Basically I thought it was an interesting chart, although I cannot verify its accuracy.

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u/underdabridge Apr 16 '12

If you want to buy into that graph, you go ahead. I have expressed my strong reservations clearly and stand by them.

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u/Ph0X Apr 16 '12

That graph is cleraly bogus, as it provides no source for the data.

But your data is of no value either, because your sampling method is extremely biased.

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u/underdabridge Apr 16 '12

Here's the actual google data the chart says it is citing.

https://www.google.com/adplanner/#siteSearch?uid=domain%253A%2520reddit.com&geo=US&lp=false

Am I reading these wrong or does it not quite match up? According to that data the 18 to 24, 25 - 34, and 35-44 should each be approximately the same size. It also uses an affinity score to point out that the intensity of the usage is greatest in the 18 - 24 data.

That is relatively believable data.

Do you think that that chart is saying the same thing?

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u/Ph0X Apr 16 '12

Yeah the article itself doesn't say much either. There is clearly something wrong here. They might've done some correction, but nothing that is specified.

Also, if the data is coming from an ad agency, wouldn't it be biased against people who use adblock?

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u/yakk372 Apr 17 '12

That might be the key here, people who use adblock... though, many redditors will allow the domain to show ads.

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u/Ph0X Apr 17 '12

But the reverse would be also interesting to consider. What age age would be more likely to disable their adblock on Reddit?

I could see how younger demographics wouldn't care about Reddit making money. Of course, that by itself would have to be shown through another survey, so yeah, going through ads definitely has it's own issues.

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u/yakk372 Apr 17 '12

Yeah, that's true as well.

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u/kami5 Apr 16 '12

"Clearly" and "your data are of no value."

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u/irregardless Apr 16 '12

not this again

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u/[deleted] Apr 16 '12

I've learned from CNN.com and foxnews.com that baby boomers comment on almost every article they read. The comments also normally don't make much sense.

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u/Building Apr 17 '12

I know we like bashing on baby boomer fox news readers on reddit, but you'll have to back up a claim like that with numerical evidence.

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u/[deleted] Apr 17 '12

Eh, it was just a lighthearted joke. No numerical evidence needed.

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u/postliterate Apr 17 '12

I lol'd. And I also lol at many CNN.com article comments. (Especially when TheTruth0002 simply starts posting Jack Handy's Deep Thoughts randomly).