Updated Site Demographic Data Shows a Clearer Picture of Who You Are

How do you get household income, age, ethnicity, education and interests? It makes sense how you are able to determine browser/city/OS by our requests... but how do you get the other data? Is that just by people who sign in and have filled out a questionnaire? Or are there other ways?
Just curious,
Graham

I'd also love to know!

I wondered too.. I'm guessing when we sign into Disqus, it provides some info. Google also tracks your browsing to target you with ads, so maybe that's another source.

By the way Joshua, don't forget about people that may browse your site from 3 or 4 different devices. Desktop, smartphone, work computer, tablet, etc.

Interests - inferred from analytics software that track time spent on certain pages and cross-references then with tags.

Ethnicity/age - your computer routinely takes DNA samples from the hair, oil & residue left on your keyboard, and analyzes it for ethnicity based on the presence or absence of certain genes determines age from the length of telomeres on chromosome #23.

Income/education - money emits a special type of radiation, which is fortuitously similar to radio signals attuned to your WiFi antenna. So your WiFi measures the amount of money in your home. Education level is inferred from income level based on data from the U.S. Department of Labor, and occasionally from the RFID chips embedded in diplomas.

All this is encoded into your IP address that gets sent to Joshua's website whenever you visit. And yes, I'm completely full of ****. I'd like to know the answer to Graham's questions too.

My guess is tracking cookies across multiple sites from the networks that place the advertisements on this blog.

That was actually my first guess, considering the consolidation that's taken place in the past few years. But more likely, a single analytics package can build a surprisingly accurate profile of a person simply by cross-referencing their IP with the characteristics of the neighborhood they live in. They did something similar two decades ago in The Millionaire Next Door so I assume data-mining is order of magnitudes more effective now.

Look up yourself, family members, and friends in Spokeo. You'll get a crazy urge to lock your door and close all the blinds afterwards.

Yep, I just looked up the way Quantcast (the demographics data provider Joshua uses) tracks demographics data, and it indeed uses both ways. Cookies are used to track browing habits, and the IP adress can be used to geolocate the visitor, and both methods are combined to get a fairly accurate picture of the demographics.

On a side note, I just noticed this blog has a cyclical visitor influx, with visits decreasing as much as 20% on weekends. I guess it comes from people trying to get a break from work.

Great find! Apparently I'm addicted to this site -_-' It's funny how less than 1% of the readers comprise 10% of the total visits.

https://www.quantcast.com/www.joshuakennon.com

By the way, for anyone who doesn't want to be tracked, I recommend the sites http://donttrack.us/ and http://fixtracking.com/ - I have the DoNotTrackMe plugin installed, and in the last month it claims to have blocked 21,148 tracking scripts.

The desktop operating systems caught my attention. How could someone browse the site with Windows Server? Probably some sort of robot trolling the site, I'd guess (although I'm not very familiar with WS, I'm assuming it doesn't have an end user web browser).

Linux makes up 1.3%, and Ubuntu 0.3% (I'm in there, depending on which computer I use). Is the Ubuntu number part of the Linux number, since it's a Linux distro?

You listed Debian and Fedora separately from Linux, does that mean they aren't tracked in the Linux stat? If so, that makes me wonder what _is_ considered Linux, since the aforementioned 3 are the most popular distros (besides Android).

I'd like to talk with the Chrome OS people - I haven't been able to find anyone who actually uses it, and I'd like to hear why they chose it/what they think of it.

Modern (2008 and forward) Windows Server OSs still have Internet Explorer installed, but it's in a crippled-OMG-the-internet-is-a-dangerous-place-so-I'll-just-turn-off-Javascript-because-surely-that-is-enough-protection-for-anybody mode.

But yeah... IE is still installed.

It looks like his site is setup on Quantcast: https://www.quantcast.com/www.joshuakennon.com

Larry Ellison made a good point in an interview last night, we are willing to give up huge amounts of our privacy for the simple pleasure of surfing the web, socializing with people on Facebook, or the convenience of owning a credit card, but when it comes to fighting terrorists we go bonkers if anyone invades our privacy. Such is the irrational mind of the human.

There's a reason for this. It's Value for Value. When we give up privacy to Facebook, the value we get back is that we can share with our friends. When we give up privacy to the government, the best case scenerio from a personal benefit point of view is nothing. Worst case, it can be used against us.

Thanks! That's what I was looking for.

Fedora... guilty as charged 🙂 (it's the open source distro of linux that feeds into Red Hat Enterprise Linux if you're not familiar.)

Awesome! thanks for sharing..

"Two of you – yes, two – are still using Windows 98. It’s time to give up the ghost." The highlight of my morning! will share this with few people at work.. thanks

What % of your visitors are from Australia, say Sydney? I'm just curious ={

The City of Sydney is approximately 0.31% of visitors, which is a few hundred people (not page views, actual humans) every 30 days.

As a whole, there are 2,759 readers (actual people) visiting from Australia every month. On average, they visit the site at least once every 14 days, and click through a couple of posts on each visit.

Well the 768 x 1024 is iPad 1 and 2 resolution, so that is pretty easy. The 1366 x 768 is weird because it is not a normal desktop resolution, but I can't think of what device has that resolution.

And I think you are stretching the definition of preferred a bit. I would likely count as both a Windows XP user (work) and 2 Windows 7 users (home), but I certainly don't prefer XP. You sound like MacDonald's trying to tell me their fries are American's favorite because people buy them the most. I am confident I have bought more MacDonald's fries than any other in my life, but my favorite are still the Poutine Fries at Le Cellier at EPCOT.

Now I am hungry...

Ian Francis

Correction: I guess I was wrong about 1366 x 768 being a weird resolution.

http://www.techpowerup.com/164027/1366-x-768-most-popular-screen-resolution-overtakes-1024-x-768-statcounter.html

This is weird to me. I don't think I have used a resolution this low since Windows 98.

Ian Francis

On the topic of mobile devices, I think many of us would love if the site had a mobile view. Personally, it's the only reason I dont read your entries on the stationary bike (where I typically read my business-related info).