[casual_games] RE: How many women are playing?

[Download Free Games]

 >The portals are happy to say "Oh yeah, we have x% female players

You might be talking players and they might be talking customers.  
Apples and oranges.

 >I'm beginning to think that no one *really *knows* *and that 64.7% of 
all statistics are bull****!

You can know by mining your customer list, survey data, or registration 
list - very easy.  However, that only gives you the percentage of women 
who buy games, fill out surveys, or register which might be all a portal 
would be looking for. 

Just like any kind of data mining, you can only do what you can do.  
Getting gender demographics of every user is near impossible, they 
aren't all going to tell you.  IP tagging doesn't work (too many dynamic 
IPs), cookie data isn't completely useful (more than 1 user on a 
computer, cookie washing etc.), even customer data could be misleading 
(mom buys a game for her son - user is male, purchaser is female).  
Studies show women make the vast majority of purchases in a family so it 
is no wonder that the percentage could be skewing higher toward female 
than it actually is.

All that taken into consideration, I think the current methods of data 
mining are fairly reliable (if done right - large enough sample over a 
large enough period of time) and give a very good approximation of who 
the users are on that particular site.

Jim Rosenquist
President
Download Free Games
http://www.download-free-games.com



Gniewko Lubecki wrote:
>> There must be someone who can point me in the right direction.
>>
>> I need to know how many women (16 to 50) are playing games, 
>> online and where on earth they are?! Easy...?
>>
>> My best guess is approximately 140 million women (16-50yrs) 
>> are playing games online. 24,342,255 in EU 42,571,743 in US 
>> and Canada 72,898,523 in Korea, Japan and China (this figure 
>> must be waaay out)
>>     However, this is based on various sources, some of which 
>> date back to 2002 and too vague for an up-to-the-minute report.
>>
>> The portals are happy to say "Oh yeah, we have x% female 
>> players...aged between 30ish and 40ish" and the aggregators 
>> who boast of worldwide coverage and god-like reach 'don't 
>> know their arse from their elbow' (as we say in the UK).
>>
>> I'm beginning to think that no one *really *knows* *and that 
>> 64.7% of all statistics are bull****!
>>
>> Rant over. Does anyone *really* know?
>>     
>
> On my site (www.riddler.com) the split is about 62/38 female/male. Are
> you trying to find the total number of women who play? That would be
> very difficult... Percentages are much easier to come by, but they vary
> a lot by genre. You probably don't have very many women playing World of
> Warcraft, but casual games are played mostly by women.
>
> Gniewko
>
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