That’s interesting. Maybe I should make them staff.

Secret sauce, Chris! Can we have some?

Thanks for quantifying and you definitely bring up some good points in the conversation. At Quantcast we employ a convergent and holistic model of the Internet. What this means is that we combine panel data, survey data and directly measured traffic data to come up with a highly accurate model of the Internet. From this we can gauge the demos of individual sites.

One of the most interesting things you will see on the profiles is the audience composition and the share of visits pie charts. Most people know there core audience that reads the site every day, but don’t know their passerby audience very well. We find that the demographic of this audience can be very different. In the case of a blog, a visitor who comes to your site because of the content of a specific post vs. a visitor who comes everyday because they like reading that author. We are working on new ways to help publishers differentiate this in their profiles but it is interesting to see how different these audiences can be.

Hope this helps. Don’t hesitate to contact me with any other questions and thanks for quantifying.

Thanks,

Chris
cmartellotti@quantcast.com

As for the “lack” of youth, don’t forget there’s a pretty decent skew towards people in mid-career on this site and other nptech sites. This includes people just getting out of grad school and moving on to other things, as well as people taking on their second job in the nonprofit sector.

I’ve written to Quantcast before about other things. I can ask them for you if you want.

I’d like to preface the below by saying I love the idea of Quantcast and have Quantified my own nonprofit’s website.

Something still doesn’t sit right with me regarding your demographics. I have a hard time swallowing the idea that a nonprofit tech geek blog is being viewed by almost retired people (even “web entrepreneurs”). If you take the NTC07 as an example core audience, I’d say the average age was probably middle age (taking in my own further bias as someone in their early 30s and felt that most people there were closer to my age). I wonder what would happen if you added a poll about your visitor’s age groups to see if it matches Quantcast’s demographics?

I went hunting a little for some other quantcast weirdness and stumbled on this (which I found through their blog):
http://www.quantcast.com/wisebread.com: “The site attracts a primarily male, college educated, more youthful group.The typical visitor reads ScienceDaily, frequents iVillage, and patronizes beauty.ivillage.com.”
This is a Quantified site… so, a primarily male, more youthful group patronizes beauty.ivillage.com? Er… que?

I know it’s not an exact science, but I guess I just wish I knew more about how the panels work. I read their FAQ but I crave more info. I should really write to them, too, but I know how passionate you are about this, so I thought I’d write here too. If I get some good explanations, I’ll happily post them here too!

It also explains the huge amount of interest in my top 10 list of things that nonprofit web entrepreneurs should know. I guess there are lot of well-educated nonprofit entrepreneurs out there looking for advice.