2018 PHB Readers’ Survey Results

Hello, Poptropicans! It’s Lucky Joker here with the 2018 PHB Readers’ Survey results and analysis!

In February, we held a survey nearly throughout the entire month to help us better understand our reader demographic. Over the course of the three weeks the survey was left open, we received 147 individual responses from people across the globe.

Down below are various interactive charts, made with Google Sheets, that you can hover over to view more details about each question—like how many people chose a certain option, for example. Let’s get into it!

As you might know, the PHB has conducted a few readers’ surveys like this in the past years (2014, 2016, and 2017). We were curious to see how many people took those surveys and were back to take this one.

Only 11.6% of this year’s participants also participated in 2014’s survey, which is a decrease from last year’s result. That percentage almost doubles for 2016, with 20.6% of this year’s participants also taking that survey. A higher 32.2% of people partook in last year’s survey, and a whopping 35.7% of respondents chose 2018 as their first year participating in our readers’ survey. To me, this was quite surprising. There must be a good amount of new readers since last year.

Next, we asked a pretty straightforward question: What is your gender? The result seems to be about the same every year with the majority of our readers being female. However, there was an increase in the percentage of males taking the survey this year with 39.9%.

Also, there are a select few that don’t identify as male nor female, as seen in the graph.

Poptropica’s targeted age range (ages 6-15) continues to be the largest group of respondents, totaling at about 55%, which makes sense.

An interesting thing to note, though, is that the older age sections have grown, and the younger age sections have shrunken over the last year—and this seems to be an ongoing trend. There are more adults in the community than in previous years. This is most likely because those of us who began playing as younger kids have stuck around to grow older with the community.

What country do you live in?

The next question we asked was what country you live in, and this geographical chart shows just that. You can hover over any country to see how many people took the survey from that particular place.

The darker the shade of blue—the more people from that country that took the survey; the lighter the shade—the fewer survey takers there are from that country.

If a country appears gray, that means there were no participants from that country.

The United States is, once again, the leading country of survey participants with an overwhelming 73.9%. Here’s a pie chart that also displays this data:

For the sake of comparison among the other countries, I’ve also created this pie chart without the US responses.

Besides the US, the two countries with the most readers is Canada (with 8.7% overall, 33.3% excluding the US) and India (with 3.6% overall, 13.9% excluding the US). As for the rest of the countries, it’s pretty much even. This includes Australia, which was once one of the countries with the highest reader population of the PHB. Sad to see you go, Aussies.

If you live in the US, which state or territory do you live in?

With another question about location comes another geographical chart. It works the same as before: just hover over any state to see how many people from that particular state took the survey.

Presumably, the states with a general high population will have the most readers and that seems to be the case here, as the top 5 states with the most survey participants are California (15.4%), New York (8.7%), Florida (7.7%), Ohio (7.7%), and Texas (5.8%)—all of which are in the top 10 most populous states of the US.

Now let’s move on to the Poptropica-related questions.

Here we ask which year you started playing Poptropica.

As you can see from the charts, 2010 still remains to be the most popular year our readers began playing Poptropica. Overall, the earlier years seem to be the time when most people joined Poptropica—which is pretty much an identical result to last year. You can tell if you compare the first six years to the last six years in the pie chart.

The results for this question are fairly interesting. Once again, the respondents are pretty split between all of the options.

However, it’s worthy to note that it appears people are playing Poptropica less often than before. The leading category this year is once every couple of weeks, whereas before the most populous category for the past three surveys was a few times a week. Quite the difference there. This is most likely due to Poptropica putting out new content less frequently as they once were.

As for membership, just like last year, the results are not so split.

The participants that do have (or are expecting) membership remain the minority (19.3%) and the participants that don’t have membership remain the majority (80.7%). A large portion of those who don’t have membership are players who have never had a membership before—56.6% to be exact—which is an increase from last year.

And now to the PHB-related questions!

Here we start off with the question asking of when you found the PHB.

As to be expected, more of the recent years got the most votes. However, there are still a few oldtimers reading the PHB today (or at least that came back to take the survey).

Visibly, the leading year is 2016, consuming almost a quarter of the pie chart alone. Not too far behind are the years 2015 and 2017 with about 15%, and after that, 2014, with 12.1%.

With no surprise, searching the web dominates all of the other options with an immense 81%, just like all of our past surveys—probably to get help on an island (but we’ll get more into that later). 8.2% say they found the PHB from another website, and 4.1% say they found the PHB through social media. These are both significant increases from last year. On the flipside, the from a friend option percentage underwent a decrease from last year. The remaining one respondent says they found the PHB through a teacher. It’s great to see we’re reaching people in new ways!

We covered the when and the how, but now it’s time to see how often. For this next question we asked how frequently you visit the PHB.

Unfortunately, it looks like people are checking up on the PHB less often. Last year, the most popular choice was once a day, and before that—several times a day. Now, most people are on the PHB several times a week, a few times a week, and once every couple of months. Still, not too shabby.

I’m assuming this also has to do with the lack of content we’ve been getting from Poptropica, so there isn’t much news to post about.

Poptropica News continues to be the reigning most enjoyed post category with over 100 votes. Many of you also said you enjoyed Blog Updates, Reviews, Contests, Pop 5s, My Place in Poptropica stories, and Spotted Dragon’s Community Creations series—each with 50-70 votes.

A few of you used the other option to type in what you enjoyed that wasn’t on our list in the survey including our Island Guide pages and Popspiracies posts. Three people even typed all of them. Thanks, guys!

We also wanted to know what other facets of the Poptropica Help Network you typically browsed, and it looks like all of them get a decent viewing.

Poptropica Wiki has gained quite the amount of popularity with almost double the percentage of last year’s result. Everything else has stayed very much the same, however.

Outside of the Poptropica Help Network are dozens of other Poptropica sites, with writers who work diligently to provide the best of Poptropica news and other great stuff—and we were wondering which ones you frequently visit.

This year is the first year where most of our participants say they only view the PHB and no other fansites.

Other than the PHB, though, the three most popular choices were Lucky Wing’s Blog O’ Fun (with 11 votes), the Poptropica Creators’ Blog (with 10 votes), and Clawtropica (with 7 votes).

Although some of the other sites didn’t receive as many votes, they are still great sites nonetheless and we encourage you to check them out! Many of them are affiliated with the Poptropica Blogger’s Network.

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Well, that concludes the 2018 survey analysis! I hope you enjoyed this insight on our reader demographic — I sure did!

What did you think of the results? Were there any that surprised you? Make sure to leave your thoughts in the comments section below!

Hope you can join us next year for the 2019 survey!

– Lucky Joker 🍀