Microsoft's AdCenter advertising service has a demographic predictor as part of their labs; It's supposed to indicate what audience can be expected to respond to a certain search term or URL. Here's the results for dashes.com:
Gender: Male Oriented with following Confidence:
Age: <18 Oriented with following distribution:
I'm a bit skeptical that my readers are that young, but it's interesting to see what the service says regardless. And thanks to George for the link.
I'm Anil Dash, and I've been blogging here since 1999, writing about how culture is made. Contact me at anil@dashes.com, at +1 646 833 8659, or at anildash on Twitter or IM. Find out more »
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skeptical? me too....I don’t know what tech. they are using but after logically thinking about it,.... when you click to find customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information for particular URL their bot look inside content of the site and matches the frequent used keywords with the generalize data they have; same as it happens in case of search engines......But as the process is way too analytical its probably be not even 55% accurate......Technology in some ways cant beat human mind...isn’t it ?
http://websoup.blogspot.com/2005/12/most-precise-search-engine.html
I'll come down on the skeptical side. I have a hard time believing that Obsession with Food is so disproportionately popular with the under-18 crowd.
Too many mentions of LiveJournal perhaps? OMG! lol
Your music tastes never left your early 20s, so why should your blog?
My mileage is much the same as Anil's. 54/46 split on sex, and a similarly descending age demographic.
Unless a site has massive traffic or serves a niche market I suspect it's of little practical use. It'll only make a difference where a percentage point makes a difference.
But if you are a blogger or you serve a niche market your readership profile is probably pretty obvious anyway. I had to really hunt around for a site in my own niche market that skewed the results beyond my own.
www.englishcrafts.co.uk does the trick - mainly female, mainly older. But it wouldn't take a degree in advertising (or a Microsoft tool) to see that!
Skeptical -- Blogher got the same demographics you did. I'll say we should be skeptical.
Although most here don't agree, I've been tracking this stuff for a while now and am always shocked by how young the average "joe" and "janet" is. Before we go all ballistic on these services (which I admit I have done) let's think for just a touch on myspace....I joined a free service that allows you to browse all the members and was amazed at the NUMBERS of kids signed up....With a blog, you might think..."not here" but it's still about seo and what happens when certain terms are punched in....I think this and all other services like it should give us pause. I've been much "cleaner" since seeing my results!
T
I guess the real problem isn't where your hits are coming from, but who your returning visitors are.
My own blog has a name that (unfortunately) rates highly in sex searches ('granny' is a sex industry term for an older woman). So I get a lot of 5-second hits from the wrong sort of visitor.
What I'd like is a tool that analyses the demographics of my returning visitors and market. I'm sure there's plenty of such tools for SEO experts, but my expertise is in what I blog about, not in SEO. I'm sure I'm not alone.