The 2015 Reader Segmentation Survey results are in and just like the prior year, Millennial readers continue to comprise the largest readership segment. Having said that, they did lose a sliver of ground to Gen X and Baby Boomer readers. We’ll examine the full results soon but today’s post is going to dive into results from the 25-34 age group and highlight any changes from the previous year.
Readership Share & Occupation
Although Millennials didn’t experience as large of a gain as the previous year and dropped a single percent point in overall readership, they still comprised 15 percent more than Gen-Xers.
More than half of all Millennial readers work as arts administrators and of those, nearly 2/3 work in the orchestra field. The number of Millennial executives shot up this year while those working in marketing, development, and education departments remained strong. One new trend were Millennials identifying as other, they tended to have positions that worked across multiple departments. It will be curious to see if this is the beginning of a new jack-of-all-trades arts admin.
Value, Satisfaction, & Engagement
Among all sections of the survey, this area changed the most. Compared to Gen X and Baby Boomers, Millennials continue to read more culture blogs every day although that gap narrowed from last year. Likewise, Millennial readers placed less overall value on all forms of media for obtaining cultural news and their satisfaction levels fell as well. Culture blogs continued to dominate as the go-to source, but it still dropped more than 20 points from last year. The closest outlet to blogs, online newspapers, suffered worse with a substantial drop. The only segment to fare slightly better than the previous year was radio. Even though compared to last year, more millennial readers found it an important resource for cultural news, only a quarter of Millennial readers found it a worthwhile source. The remaining outlets, television, discussion forums, and print newspapers, continued to generate extremely low satisfaction rates.This is another area where Millennial readers shifted their habits. A nearly even share of readers indicated they communicate with friends and colleagues anywhere from once a week to one a month while nearly 1 out of 10 communicate at least once a day. Compared to last year, Gen-X and Baby Boomer engagement is far more frequent and nearly at the same level with Millennial peers. In the end, Millennials are communicating with peers a little less frequently while other generations are communicating more often.
But Why?
Facts, integrity, and coverage of recent events trumped one of last year’s strongest reasons that drew Millennials to culture blogs: personality. Much like the previous year, these results were similar to other age groups.
And it wouldn’t be fun without a big, infographic to help tie everything together…
Each year, the Readership Segmentation Surveys produce some intriguing insight and this year was no exception. This year’s results produced more responses than the…
I’m en route to Chattanooga today to attend a concert on Thursday, 3/2/2017 of my wife, violinist Holly Mulcahy, performing Jim Stephenson’s Tributes violin…
6 thoughts on “Reader Survey Results: Millennials Continue To Dominate”
Very interesting results some of which are what I would have expected (move away from traditional news outlets) and some that surprised me (generalist trend vs. specialization). Just curious about how large your sample size was for the survey. Nicely done…the information contained is well organized and easy to digest. Dileep
Drew, yes I understand that but wondered how many people responded in total to understand if the statistics included a sample size that had meaningful relevancy. Dileep
It certainly wouldn’t be useful if it only included a few dozen readers, would it? Fortunately, the number of respondents were over 1000.
Wonderful…that is a great response! Dileep
Thank you and I have to say, it never ceases to amaze me how generous readers are with their time over the years when taking these surveys. Consequently, they have a good deal of impact on content, topics, and the overall tone of the blog.
Very interesting results some of which are what I would have expected (move away from traditional news outlets) and some that surprised me (generalist trend vs. specialization). Just curious about how large your sample size was for the survey. Nicely done…the information contained is well organized and easy to digest. Dileep
Hi Dileep, for this article, I used 100 percent of respondents who indicated they were in the 25-34 age group.
Drew, yes I understand that but wondered how many people responded in total to understand if the statistics included a sample size that had meaningful relevancy. Dileep
It certainly wouldn’t be useful if it only included a few dozen readers, would it? Fortunately, the number of respondents were over 1000.
Wonderful…that is a great response! Dileep
Thank you and I have to say, it never ceases to amaze me how generous readers are with their time over the years when taking these surveys. Consequently, they have a good deal of impact on content, topics, and the overall tone of the blog.