It’s fun and useful for me to learn about the readers of this blog in terms of who they are and what their interests are in terms of the types of posts that I do.
Below are the results of two recent reader surveys that I did to get this kind of information. The two polls got 162 and 192 responses, respectively.
Before I get to discussing the results, I also included a prize/raffle element to this survey whereby I would choose one winner out of the participants who would receive a stem cell t-shirt, and signed copies of my two books, Stem Cells: An Insiders Guide and GMO Sapiens.
And the winner of the random drawing is Josephine “Jo” Bowles, Senior Lecturer at the School of Biomedical Sciences at The University of Queensland, Australia.
Congratulations, Jo!
Okay, now to the results.
Who are you?
The first survey asked you all about your backgrounds. Exactly half of you turn out to be scientists with more academic researchers, but also quite a few industry researchers. Many of you are also patients or patient advocates, with your numbers being about the same as industry scientists. I tried really hard to think of as many types of backgrounds as I could for this poll, but even so in fourth place was “other” in this survey.
One category that in hindsight I should have included was “teacher”, but if you answered “other” in this survey please let me know in the comments what kinds of backgrounds I missed. The fifth most common selection was “Physician”, which doesn’t surprise. I hear from doctors regularly that they are readers. I was surprised not to see more journalists showing up in this survey since they also regularly get in touch about specific posts that they read. Of course this survey is not scientific and may not be very precise.
What kind of content do you like?
The second survey asked you all about what kinds of blog posts here on the Niche that you like the most. Here again came the challenge for me of what categories to include. The types of posts that are the most work and frankly pose the greatest risk to me are the ones that turned out to be the most popular: investigations. People want to know facts and new insights about difficult, messy situations. I get it and I try to regularly do those kinds of pieces despite the fact that I’m so busy, these take more time, and like I said I always am concerned about risks of being sued or threatened.
Other popular types of posts included Newsy items, journal-club like paper reviews, opinion pieces and interviews. I was surprised that CRISPR pieces weren’t more popular because when I do them I can see in the metrics that they are heavily read, but then again this is mostly a stem cell blog.
Thanks for doing the survey and please as you read consider adding in your voice in the comments.
I suppose I’m loosely in the communications sector; your blog (and various social media outputs) are very useful tools in identifying topics to cover as well as being a reliable benchmark. If I have my doubts about something, I can also confirm or relieve myself of those doubts here!
I recently subscribed, because I wanted to learn more about this field- particularly scientific substantiation for medical treatments involving stem cells and how businesses are allowed to advertise claimed results. I work in a trade practices/self regulation role, and find this information helpful.