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Staff / From the minds of Ars

The great Ars survey: The results are in

17,000 of you spoke to us, and we're listening.

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Earlier this year we asked you, esteemed readers, to take our most recent survey and share your thoughts on how we are doing. This has been something of a yearly ritual for us, and it's one of the most important things I consider when making decisions about the direction of the site and what things we need to work on. We do get three other critical kinds of feedback: traffic analytics, reader comments, and feedback from our peers in the industry, but we particularly value our surveys because so many of you are generous with your time. This year, nearly 17,000 people took the survey! As we look at the results, I'll share some of my thoughts on the data.

Reader behavior

One of the reasons that we take the survey so seriously is because it's our core audience that takes it. More than one-third of the respondents visit more than twice a day, and 85 percent are daily visitors. These are people who know us. As it turns out, most of them have known us for a very long time.

A quarter of our audience has been reading us since 2005 or before, with 15 percent saying they've been with us for a decade or longer. Considering that our audience is approximately five times the size it was ten years ago, we feel lucky to have retained so many readers. But we’re also excited that we have even more readers who have joined us in the last five years and have stuck around.

Who you are

This time around, we wanted to ask more questions about who you are. Most of you work in a computing field, but there is a lot of diversity in what you do. Fifteen percent of you are IT decision makers (i.e., director, CTO, manager, etc.). Thirty-three percent of you work in IT, while 21 percent of you work in computer-intensive fields outside of IT (i.e., developer, CAD/design, medical technology, etc.). Twenty percent of you said that you work extensively with computers, but not in a specialist role. Finally, nine percent of you said that computers are not a critical part of your professional life (mostly students, but not exclusively).

When we asked specifically about job titles, there was a big surprise. Fifteen percent of you said you were developers, and this surprised nearly everyone on staff. We were not surprised to see 5 percent of respondents identify themselves as CTO/CIO, nor with 16 percent being systems engineers. But we were shocked to see that 4 percent of you are lawyers, 3 percent of you are professors, and 3 percent of you are professional scientists. Eight percent identified themselves as systems administrators, while 7 percent identified themselves as support technicians. All in all, you’re an incredibly technical bunch.

You're also surprisingly entrepreneurial. Thirty percent of you have started your own company, and eight percent of you have done it more than once. Forty percent of you directly invest in the stock market, which was less than I would have guessed.

But enough about all the work stuff. We also wanted to know what you do for fun. This data comes out nicely in chart form, and it carries a few surprises, too.

I was happy to see that 80 percent of you love books. Cooking came in surprisingly high, but it was no shock that 73 percent of you enjoy playing video games.

Adults play video games, particularly adults who are technology professionals, which often comes as a surprise to those outside the tech world. That high percentage is something that has long confused statisticians who note that Ars has an incredibly high index of IT professionals (stemming from third-party studies of our audience by the likes of comScore and others). I believe it is largely a generational thing. Most of the tech people I know in their 30s enjoy gaming, while there are few in the tech world who are older than 45 for whom I would say the same. This isn't to say that everyone who enjoys gaming spends 30 hours a week doing it or that they necessarily do it on a console. But you can see from the chart above that at least for our audience, gaming rivals any other form of entertainment.

There were also several notable write-in responses, many of which necessitated a facepalm because we left them off the official list. They include 2 percent for photography, 3 percent for programming, 1 percent for gardening, and 1 percent for shooting. I was also surprised to see that 2 percent of you say you love to ride motorcycles. Please, please watch out for the crazy drivers (I used to ride a motorcycle in college).

Ars report card

Now we get to the part that matters most, namely your opinions on how we're doing. Many of you wrote in to complain that we didn’t ask about science and tech policy coverage, which clearly many of you love. In retrospect, we should have asked, but we’re always wary of asking too much and driving participation down. Rest assured, we’ll ask again in the future. Now, to the report card:

Overall, I see a lot to be proud of and grateful for here. You are a critical audience, and while I was surprised at how many of you were undecided on some of these questions, in every instance the majority of you expressed confidence in what we are doing. I suppose it should not be a surprise that 91 percent of you feel that we deliver the most important technology news. Most of you taking the survey are clearly invested in the work that we do.

When it comes to the site redesign that was unveiled in 2012, I was very pleased to see that 75 percent of you approve of it. It also appears from our analytics that most of the design decisions we made have been worthwhile. Of course, design is an ongoing process, but this data confirms that we are headed in the right direction, despite the fact that we know some of you sincerely do not like it.

Seventy-five percent of you believe that the recent increase in product reviews has been great. A little less than 20 percent are undecided on the matter, and I'll be straight with you: we have a lot of work to do in this area. Traffic on our reviews is strong, and comments are typically positive. But we know that there are differing expectations for what the reviews should contain, and we continue to search for the right formula for Ars. But the data shows that we’re making the right decision to expand further into this area.

I'd also like to address our renewed attention to Android. Seventy-three percent of you agree that it is been a good thing, with only 5 percent of you disagreeing. Here, too, there is work to be done, but this is a clear mandate that we need to stay focused on this area.

Sixty-five percent said that our Microsoft coverage is best in class, with a big portion undecided on the question. Many of you may recall that we made specific changes over the past few years, bringing considerably more focus to Microsoft. In the recent year we have done more long-form reporting on Microsoft than any other company. I think it is also fair to say that we have done more in-depth work in this area than just about any other site. We not only dove deep into Windows 8, but we had the most complete coverage of the new version of Office, and we continue to be one of the few sites that pays considerable attention to Microsoft's other ventures, including Server, Exchange, and others.

When it comes to Apple, 75 percent of you say our coverage is best in class, and I must admit to being pleasantly surprised when I saw such high satisfaction. That isn't because I don't believe the Infinite Loop team doesn't do fantastic work. It's just that complaining about Apple coverage at Ars is something of a hobby horse for a vocal minority of readers. Curious, I cross-checked this data with the data on how long people have been reading Ars. As it turns out, the longer someone has been reading Ars, the more likely they are to agree or strongly agree that our coverage here is fantastic. And that includes people who were around back in the days when I was bashing the iMac and making fun of Mac OS X Server. Ah, the good old days.

We also asked you if you thought that our gaming coverage was highly valuable. When Ben left in early 2012, many of you (and us) felt as though we had lost a family member. We also knew that Ben’s unique style and personality was not going to be reproducible. So Ben and I discussed possible replacements, and our current gaming editor was at the top of Ben's list. Almost a year into Kyle Orland's work here, 57 percent of you find his work valuable, while 26 percent of you are undecided. 17 percent do not presently find our gaming coverage to be highly valuable, but here I must note that this is the same percentage that we saw when we asked the same question 3 years ago. The difference between now and then is an increase in undecided respondents, which means we have more work to do in this department—but it is by no means suffering.

We also took the opportunity to ask about our new comment voting system, which remains both controversial and highly utilized. The results are very clear: 68 percent of you believe that it is a real improvement, while 26 percent are undecided. Only 6 percent disagree, which as you see below is reflective of an extremely small minority who does not like the system.

Last but not least, we asked how the new post voting system has changed your use of the site. Analytics show that commenting on the site has increased and that voting is a very popular activity. But how does our core audience feel about it? The graph pretty much tells the story (let me note that 48 percent of respondents said that they do not use the commenting system presently and never have. They are excluded from the graph). 0.6 percent of you stopped using the comments as a result, and 1.8 percent say that you use the comments less. Compare that to 3.6 percent who say that they started using them as a result of the change, and 12.5 percent that say they use them more as a result. It’s a 16.1 percent gain versus a 2.4 percent loss. The biggest group of users, of course, say that they continue to use the comments as they always have.

I will have a great deal to say about the comment voting system and its future at Ars in the near future.

In the end, we are grateful that 81 percent of you believe that Ars is currently better than it has ever been. The site is coming up on its 15th birthday. Nothing is the same 15 years after it is born, and this website is no different. Some things have remained the same, particularly the fact that we have never strived for feined neutrality, we’ve always embraced long-form reporting, and we put the community at the center of our work. We’ve also continued to focus on what we collectively believe are the most important or interesting issues in tech, even when that puts us at odds with vocal minorities in the community.

Again, we are extremely grateful to have such an amazing audience. And to the nearly 17,000 of you who took 10 minutes of your time to share your views with us, thank you very much. No one survey, chart, or poll can ever be a deciding factor at a publication as diverse and complex as what we have built here. But as I look back at 2012—which saw double-digit growth across all site metrics—I can't help but feel that this survey is a big vote of confidence for us, while at the same time giving us opportunities to think about what we might do differently in the future. We all look forward to doing an even better job for you in 2013.

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