We hinted at the return of some long-shelved regular features on the site, and the first back is Demo-Graphics!

What is Demo-Graphics?

Each month I dive into data from Facebook looking at the various demographics it can tell us about comic fans. This isn’t hard numbers but best used to show trends in the industry and the potential of the market out there. This has shown the shift towards women being a major force in readers and a shift to the younger demographic.

How does it work?

We use key terms, “likes”, that users have indicated and have come up with our own set to measure each month. There’s over 50 terms used (and no I won’t release them). We stick to specific terms for the industry such as “comics” and “graphic novels” and “one-shots” as well as publishers and leave out broad terms like specific characters or stories. Just because someone likes Batman doesn’t mean they like comics.

Other things to know…

This data is important in that it shows who the potential comic audience could be. These are not purchasers, these are people who have shown an affinity for comics and are potential purchasers and those with an interest.

Also, with this being online/technology, due to laws and restrictions, those under the age of 13 are underrepresented.

Since the last time this feature was run, Facebook has made adjustments as to what it can report so some data is no longer available and we’ve also added in new data that hasn’t been reported before (but some of it has been tracked over the years).

Facebook Population: Around 67 million in the United States

Last month, we reported around 70 million. Things have dipped over the month with women making up about 35 million and men 32 million.

The Spanish-speaking population last month was 13.29%, that number has remained improved over the month to 13.58%.

NEW: Comics focused on kids has been an explosive area of growth over the years. The data tells us that 19.4% of comics fans are parents, that’s 13 million individuals! The amount of parents remained the same but with a smaller population, the percentage increased.

Gender and Age

Women have been a majority for a long time in this reporting. They continue to be exactly that accounting for 52.24% of the comic fans down from last month’s 52.86%. Men at accounted for 47.14% last month and now account for 47.76%. Women regularly became the majority of the fandom back in October 2017 when we first saw a 50/50 split in the demographics.

Facebook still is not good about placing gender in a binary, but it’s still a goal to better report beyond just the two regularly listed.

As we can see by the numbers below, women do slip as the majority from around age 22 to 33.

Relationship Status

Things have remained relatively steady over the month but there has been some changes from the previous month.

How has things changed?

• Those who have marked themselves “single” decreased about 1 million
• Those “in a relationship” decreased 300,000
• “Unspecified” has increased 1 million
• Other statuses shifted in numbers but their percentages remained mostly unchanged.

Education

Things remained steady from the previous month except for one “status”. “Some Grad School” over doubled from 160,000 to 330,000 individuals.

NEW – Political Leaning

Facebook is a data trove of political information. While I regularly tracked the information, I have never reported on the political leanings of the comic fans there. Well, here’s the second such release of the data!

Compared to last month, “Conservatives” dipped by about 200,000 individuals.

But what about the gender of those comic fans?

We can see, according to this data that comic fans lean more liberal than the general Facebook population. There are some interesting differences in that Conservatives are dominated by men while those Liberal and Moderate see women as a majority. Moderates especially see more women than men, even more so than liberals. We’ll see how this shifts over the months and years with the flow of American politics.

---

That’s it! Or, not… we’ll be back tomorrow as we see the European statistics!