At CinemaCon, the MPAA releases statistics on the previous year’s moviegoers. Some of those statistics are demographic based, like the gender, and race of those attending movies. I felt for this Facebook Fandom, it’d be nice to see how Facebook likes compare to this released data. Partially, this will hopefully quiet the naysayers who think the statistics I look up are complete bunk.

According to the report 52% of the moviegoing public are women. This is from the report:

Females have comprised a larger share of moviegoers (people who went to a movie at the cinema at least once in the year) consistently since 2009.

Lets look at this public stat to see how it compares on Facebook. The statistics below are all based on information within the United States.

Percent of Women on Facebook vs. Percent of Women in the United States

According to the United States Census Bureau, women make up 50.8% of the population in the United Sates as of 2012. Now, this isn’t quite equal to the number of people who are located in the United States, but overall, the numbers are within a few percentage points of each other.

Percent of Women Who “Like” Movies on Facebook vs. Percent of Moviegoers that are Women According to the MPAA

Facebook again is a few percentage points  higher, but take into account that the population already skews 2.53 percentage points higher, and the number of those “likes” versus the statistic provided by the MPAA gets a lot closer. In fact, I’d argue one backs up the other.

The MPAA also released data on the Hispanic population, the one ethnicity we can somewhat find on Facebook. The website admits that this term is for people who have shown an affinity for Hispanic things. It’s not quite an even comparison, but lets see the results. The United States Census Bureau puts that portion of the population at 16.9% as of 2012.

Percent of Hispanics on Facebook vs. Percent of Hispanics in the United States

 

Here we see things are rather skewed on Facebook. Hispanics are under represented according to the social network’s data by 4.68 percentage points, a much larger difference than with women. According to the MPAA report, Hispanics make up 25% of the ticket purchasing audience.

Percent of Hispanics Who “Like” Movies on Facebook vs. Percent of Moviegoers that are Women According to the MPAA

Here we see a much greater difference. But, when we take into account the under representation of Hispanics on Facebook, then that gap shrinks and we can guess it’s closer to 5 percentage point difference, compared to the almost 11 shown above. Again, the statistics are very close.

So, when we’ve looked at two statistics as far as Facebook “likes” and compared it to released data as well as census data, we find the Facebook data isn’t too far off from the released study.

Join us tomorrow when we look at the general Facebook comic “fan” population and see how its shifted since last month!