3. Are you in full-time or part-time employment, or self-employed, or a student, or a quote-unquote “home maker”, or retired, or unemployed? (Or something else which I’ve forgotten about?)
We are but wage slaves: 75% of you work full time, with 18% self-employed and 57% employed by someone else. Of the remainder, 6% work part time, 2 people qualify as “home makers”, and there’s one apiece for unemployed, in between jobs, long-term disabled and “of independent means”. Also, although a couple of you are already in receipt of your pensions, no-one actually counts as “full time” retired just yet.
4. Are you reading this from your place of work/study, or from your home, or from a public internet access point?
Would this have been a better question if I had said “where do you usually read this site”? Arguably – but, rightly or wrongly, I opted to take a “snapshot” of where you were at the time.
The results make depressing news for employers everywhere: 57% of you were reading at home, but a whopping 42% of you were at work.
(Note: whenever someone explained that they worked from home, I counted this as a “from home” reply.)
Although nobody was reading from a library, internet café or other public access point, one person was sufficiently Rock & Roll enough to be reading Troubled Diva from a hotel, while “on tour”. We like that.
5. Are you a university graduate? If not, at what stage did you complete your education?
What a bunch of swots! 74% of Troubled Diva readers are graduates, as against 22% non-graduates and 4% “graduands”. And blimey, weren’t you all eager to tell me exactly what kind of graduates you are! BSc, BA (hons), MA, MBA, PhD, MSc, LL.B, B.Eng, PGCE, MPhil, MEng… I especially loved the way that so many of you felt the need to add the (hons) next to your BA. Particularly since I didn’t even ask you to list your type of degree in the first place! Whatever happened to “read the question carefully”, then?
One additional fact: of the 18 non-graduates, no less than 7 (or 8.5% of the readership) started university, but dropped out before completing their studies. That’s quite high, isn’t it? Hmm.
6. Have we ever spoken with each other via private e-mail?
32% said yes; 57% said no. Conclusion: that communication between blogger and reader frequently extends beyond the blog itself. Can you imagine the same thing happening with a newspaper columnist?
7. Have we ever met each other in real life?
15 people (17%) said yes; 83% said no. Which is a little bit surprising, as I’ve meant a good deal more than 15 readers of this site over the years. Conclusion: that we’re a fickle bunch. But then, like guests at a never-ending cocktail party, of course we move on, and circulate, and work the room. It would be boring not to. Which is something to bear in mind whenever someone you’ve enjoyed talking to in the past stops visiting you, or even de-links. As in life, so in blog.
I was particularly tickled by the two readers who claim to have brushed past me at gigs without introducing themselves: especially as I didn’t actually attend one of the gigs in question (The Dears). As for the other gig (British Sea Power): yup, that was probably me (probably bored out of my skull by then; it was an exceptionally dull night).
8. Have you ever won a prize on this site?
13 of you (17%) said yes; 83% said no. As this is actually quite a high proportion of people who have won prizes, I can only conclude that prize-giving is a good seal of blog loyalty. In other words: bribe your readers with freebies, and they’ll stick around. A little tip for aspirational bloggers there!
(I jest, I jest. The other perspective is, of course, that regular loyal readers are the ones who are most likely to enter my occasional competitions in the first place.)
Which reminds me: there is going to be a prize at the end of this survey. More details once I’ve finished the full analysis.
troubled diva 