Social media demographics 2012: 24 sites including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

If you ever wanted to know the age and sex of social media users on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Github, Stack Overflow, Orkut, Quora, WordPress.com, Blogger, Flickr, Myspace, Tagged, Hi5, LiveJournal, Yelp, deviantART, StumbleUpon, Goodreads and Last.fm — you’re in luck.

Performance monitoring service Pingdom has done another one of its mammoth social media studies, this one on the demographics of social media sites — every site imaginable, one would think, except for Google+. (Because Google+ is not directly monetized yet, the service does not appear in DoubleClick Ad Planner, the tool Pingdom uses to gather the data.)

The average ages of social media users holds no surprises … more than half are between 25 and 44 years old, with only 5 percent under 17 and only 1 percent over 65. The absolute average across all social networks is 36.9 percent.

More interesting is Pingdom’s graph showing the distribution of people across all the surveyed networks, showing that deviantART is the youngest social network and LinkedIn is the oldest:

Above: Age distribution across social networks

Image Credit: Pingdom

Interestingly, Google’s Orkut — big in Brazil — stands out as the social network with the largest chunk of its users in the 35-44 demographic.

(Which, if the data is correct, shows why Orkut is starting to falter: very few users in the younger, more dynamic segments. But I have my doubts on this one, since all of Pingdom’s data is U.S.-based, and Orkut is not big Stateside.)

Another interesting stat, this on on gender: 71 percent of the sites Pingdom checked are dominated by women.

The geek and propellerhead sites Slashdot, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, and Github buck this trend, being the sausagefests of the social networking world. Between 70 percent and 90 percent of their communities are male. Quora and Orkut are also male-dominated, as is Reddit.

It’s no shock that Pinterest is female-dominated, with a 79 percent ratio. Reading social network Goodreads is also heavily female, and then there are a lot of other sites that are in the 50 percent to 60 percent range: Tumblr, Tagged, Yelp, and Flickr.

Both of today’s social networking heavyweight champions, Twitter and Facebook, fall into this category.

Above: Distribution of men versus women across social network

Image Credit: Pingdom

The biggest question in my mind: Where are all the men?

Probably fishing — and not tweeting about it.

photo credit: solidether via photo pin cc