Today we are approaching the answer to this question with an analysis of the demography of commenters on YouTube. For this, we have randomly picked 2,120 videos from YouTube, for which we found 36,459 comments. That’s an average of roughly 17 comments per video, but note that this number doesn’t mean much because the random 2,120 videos include ones that have no comments as well as ones with several thousands of comments. Since YouTube doesn’t actually expose more than 1,000 comments per video, we had to limit the analysis of the comments per video to 1,000.

Out of the 36,459 randomly picked comments that were analysed 21,464 were by male commenters, 9,914 by female commenters. The remaining 5,081 commenters did not expose their gender.

Gender of commenters on YouTube

Even if all the commenters that did not expose their gender were female (which is unlikely) – the clear majority of commenters are male.

Now let’s look at the age distribution. Out of the 36,459 randomly picked comments 26,668 provided their age. The distribution of ages is given in the next graph.

Age distribution of commenters on YouTube

The graph provides the exact age distribution as given by the commenters. Assuming they have all been truthful, we arrive at an average age of commenters of 27.59 years, i.e. the majority of commenters (namely 50.4%) are below 28 years of age.

Age distribution of commenters with 50% marked

Details of the distribution are found in this table:

Age distribution of commenters

Now, you will have noticed that out of the 36,459 randomly picked comments that were analysed, interestingly 326 declared to be over the age of 100 and the graph clearly spike for over 100 year-olds. We cannot easily make decisions about whether people have provided a misleading age or not, but for those over 100 it is a fair estimate to say that are incorrect. Since they create an unfair bias in the statistics, we also provide the analysis with ages above 100 removed.

Age distribution of commenters less than 100 years old

Now the average age of comment authors has come down to 26.6 and 52.93% of commenters are less than 27, 75% less than 36 years old.

The largest number of comments has been posted by 22 year old males (6.5%). As our initial gut feeling was the most commenters on YouTube are males between 15 and 25, this analysis has confirmed the gender and roughly the age group: the majority of commenters are between 13 and 27 years old.

We have no explanation for the weird shape of the graph which has a strong dip at 18 years and an unexpected peak at 29 years. This may well just be a problem with the small data set that we used, or there may be some fact to explain this. If you have any theories for these values, please leave a comment. We intend to undertake a broader analysis over more videos and comments in the future and may even be able to test your theories.

In collaboration with Robot Parade, we’ve put together a platform that makes this easy: an Online Engagement Platform.

The Online Engagement Platform offers a complete setup service to kick-start a career in social networks including the most important sites: a blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and RSS feeds to syndicate content. The main focus and differentiation of our service is that we have set this up in such a way that the sites can be controlled from one central location without the need to engage on every site separately. This makes it a low-touch service – something very important to the busy lives of people.

At the same time, we include into the service analytics for each of the sites – including our own VQmetrics product. The metrics are also mostly delivered through the central control platform making it simple to keep track of success. Additionally, our Vquence analysts will create quarterly reports with recommendations on how to improve on the engagement impact.

To round it all up, we offer training sessions to help be successful from the start.

I stumbled about it because four key areas that Vquence works in are mentioned as exciting new opportunities in his blog post about the topic:

• Digital video (esp. getting Internet video onto the TV)
• New analytics companies (in the vein of Compete.com, Visible Measures, Localytics, etc.)
• New forms of media/reporting/content creation
• Social media and marketing

I can only agree!