Remember once upon a time when the term “Internet” conjured up images of these guys?
Yes, there was a time when it was believed that the Internet was the sole purview of the nerdy, male computer hobbyist. Then the bubble inflated, popped, and what developed is far more demographically diverse than Benjamin, Doug and Gary – the three gentlemen pictured – could ever have imagined.
In data recently compiled by Brian Solis and visualized by InformationIsBeautiful, the Internet, at least social networking, Web 2.0 sites, actually skews towards female users. Of the most popular social networking sites, LinkedIn and YouTube have about an equal number of male and female users, while Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and MySpace all have more female than male users.
As someone who works in the PR industry, I am not at all surprised by the data’s findings, since the industry as a whole skews female and the industry as a whole embraced social media – to one degree or another – in its infancy.
Still, I would be curious to see if there was any shift in data, and in the breakdown of male to female social media users if such sites as Wikipedia and general blogging statistics were incorporated into the findings.
Tags: PR, social media