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Answer: You are an American male in his twenties

April 28, 2005 General

Thanks to the 470 of you who were gracious enough to fill out the not-especially-scientific survey, I can now state with confidence that the typical reader of johnaugust.com is a North American college graduate in his 20’s who has a Y chromosome, but no WGA card.

Now, before anyone protests, I should point out that not all readers are typical. Some are women in their 30’s from South Africa with graduate degrees; others are older, younger, or more international. And one could easily fault the methodology: it relied completely on self-reporting, with no particular incentive for readers to click the link to take the survey.

Yet the trends in the data are so clear that there’s not a lot of point keeping the survey running any longer. If you don’t believe me, maybe some charts will prove the point:

chart: male/female

The vast majority of readers are men. That’s no surprise, but I wasn’t expecting almost 90%. I don’t know whether this reflects the reality of the male/female split among screenwriters or not. Regardless, I try to vary to my pronouns, so that I’m not always talking about “a screenwriter and his script.”

chart: age

Readers are a little older than I thought. Had I known that the under-20 categories would be so sparsely populated, I would have broken up the age groups differently. Given the average age, I may feel a little more liberty to swear.

Who are you? Where do you come from?

April 25, 2005 News

On Sunday, I had lunch with Mary Edrington, my former marketing professor from Drake. She was one of the best teachers I ever had, because she did the near-impossible: she made me care about boring numbers. Even though I was much more attuned to the creative side of marketing, I always appreciated her zeal for research. It wasn’t enough to come up with a clever slogan for some product; you had to prove that there was actually a customer out there to buy it.

At lunch, she asked me who the average reader of johnaugust.com was. I confessed that I didn’t really know. I can speculate about education level of some readers based on the comments. Checking the logs, I can tell you what browser he or she uses. But my actual demographic data is an empty set.

So if you don’t mind, would you be willing to answer 10 really simple questions? I’ve timed it — it only takes 35 seconds, unless you write a big essay in the (optional) final comment box.

You can take the survey here. (Update March 2011: Link removed, outdated.)

After a week or two, I’ll put up the results.

LA Times story on DVD sales

April 24, 2005 Film Industry

The Los Angeles Times recently ran a good piece about the studios’ reluctance to disclose exactly how much money they really make on DVDs. They’re happy to tell you that home video is absolutely crucial to profitability, particularly when it comes to the threat of piracy. But ask how much money they made from DVDs on, say, Shrek, and they whistle a tune while rocking back and forth on their heels.

Of course, knowing a precise figure is not idle curiosity. Peter Jackson, for instance, is suing over Lord of the Rings, suspecting he was shortchanged somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars for DVD payments.

You can read the whole story here. (Free registration required.)

Annoying Trend Watch: Technorati spam blogs

April 24, 2005 Charlie, Rant

I use a Technorati watchlist to keep track of mentions of me, this site, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Technorati follows blogs, so it’s a nice way to gauge what topics people find interesting enough to write about. For instance, teenage girls tend to point out that “JohNny DePP iz SOOOOO HOOTTTTT!”

Over the last two weeks, I’ve noticed a disconcerting rise in the number of faux-blogs. They look like blogs, and they’re hosted on genuine sites like Blogspot. But they have no actual content, just a bunch of gibberish targeting a certain term, like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I assume they’re computer-generated. Here’s an example.

So why would anyone make a useless blog like this? Presumably, to drive traffic to other sites. The left-hand column on the example blog has links to various other sites, each of which either sells something, or has Google ads which make money on a pay-per-click basis.

It’s really annoying, because up until now, Technorati has been a terrific clutter-buster. I don’t know if the spam-blog problem is readily fixable. Unlike Google, which has algorithms to help it weed out junk sites, I think Technorati basically relies on self-reporting. The system would need to find a way to detect which blogs are real, and which ones are fake. That’s a tall order.

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