Last December, Alexa launched a new feature on their site - demographics. It measures the relative age, education, and gender of a site's users. It also measures where those users are browsing a site from (home, school, or work), and whether or not those users have children which is an odd statistic.

According to this new feature, my users are 55-64 year-old educated women with no children browsing the site from school and work.

So Women in Their Prime Visit Wopular
I'm not sure how that came about. I'm a married 35-year-old, stay-at-home dad who likes basketball, movies, the internet, cell phones, and art. How am I able to attract the relative direct opposite audience to my site? Unless that info is completely unreliable.

I compared this to the few Wopular fans I have on Facebook who aren't my friends - 13 women, 7 men. 65% of Wopular's fans on Facebook are women. Based on their photos, they seem to be older women too.

A certain part of it does make sense. People who read newspapers and are interested in current events tend to be older, but it still doesn't explain the gender.

More importantly, what can I sell to these people? What are educated women in their 50's and 60's with no children interested in buying? And by the way, aren't they a rare breed in the internet? How is it that I'm able to attract such a rare breed of internet users? Isn't this group of users really hard to sell to? Is this site doomed?

Googling Prime Time Women for Answers
For answers to these questions, I went to the wisest of the wise - Google. It gave me the answers in these three articles:

Prime Time Women Have Purchasing Power:
"They are interested in politics, they believe their vote counts and they want to stay informed."

How to Reach Those Prime-Time Women:
"They keep track of kids and grandkids, geographically dispersed friends, current events, stocks and investments, healthcare and their favorite causes by way of the internet."

It all makes sense now. "Prime Time" women are interested in current events and politics, which is what Wopular provides.

Apparently, this group is a tough sell. They like to take their time, look around, and make an inform decision. Despite the fact that they make the majority of household purchasing decisions, advertisers don't really know how to market to this group.

Here are some quotes from What Women Want: Effectively Marketing to Women:

• "Women make over 80% of all household purchasing decisions, and they are taking more and more control of the household finances."
• "Women make up 50% of the labor workforce."
• "People 50 and over control 79% of financial assets in this country. They have the money, time and willingness to purchase."
• "It will take much more effort from advertisers to effectively market to women, but spending that extra amount of time getting to know women, their likes and dislikes, will only help sell their product to a target audience that is willing to purchase."

Good to Know Anyway
Fantastic. If advertisers don't know how to reach this group then I'm pretty screwed. Since I've been testing out ad networks on subpages in the past month, this is still good to know anyway.

I'll need to compare this data with other third-party stats. I think I have a decent sample size from Alexa. My worldwide ranking is about 26,000 there. I have about 400,000 unique visitors per month, according to Google Analytics. Too bad they don't have a demographics feature.

UPDATE: According to Quantcast: "This site reaches over 119K U.S. monthly people. The site is popular among a 50+, 60-100k HH income bracket, somewhat male following.The typical visitor reads Huffington Post and subscribes to Entertainment Weekly." Sounds about right, except for the gender. This site does attract an older audience - the Leno/Letterman crowd. I still need another comparison to pin down the gender though.