Who Reads Valley of the Geeks?
Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Survey Says...

Although we wanted to do an exhaustive survey of our readers, our marketing budget has been cut, so after brainstorming over a few margaritas we decided to do what most researchers do, which is to just make stuff up.

• 58% of our readers are men
• 8% are men pretending to be women in online chat forums
• 27% earn more than $120,000 per year, but report substantially less to the IRS
• 32% know what RTFM means
• 28% would prefer to write C++ macros rather than interact with a real person
• 5% routinely examine the HTML source code to see if there are hidden jokes
• 22% think about sex while surfing the Internet
• 7% think about the Internet while having sex

Valley of the Geeks gets tens of thousands of visitors weekly from Silicon Valley and around the world.  Our readers include programmers, web masters, financial analysts, stock brokers, consultants, executives, marketing dudes and sales slime from some of the most prominent companies in high-tech, many of whom are still in business. Readers come from well-known companies such as Microsoft, Waggner Edstrom, Intel, HP, Compaq, Sun, Apple, Oracle, AOL, Borland, IBM, BEA, Enron, Citibank, JP Morgan, Chase, Merrill Lynch, Nortel, Cisco and Xerox. Ok, some of these guys should probably be focused on running their business, but who are we to complain? We also get many readers from leading .edu, .gov and .mil sites which is scary if you think about it. ("No we haven't found Bin Laden yet, but check out these fake banner ads!")

Around the World at 56K

If an area has a Silicon Glen, Silicon Beach, Silicon Gulch, Silicon Prairie, Silicon Jungle, Silicon Coal Mine or Silicon dorm room, we've probably got readers there. I'm not sure how people find this web site, but I'm happy if they do. Judging by some of the email we get I'm also happy I have an unlisted phone number and no spare bedroom, if you know what I mean.

The majority of readers come from the US and Canada (eh?) but we also have a large number of international readers from Andorra to Zambia and all points in between. This includes many countries which we would have trouble locating on a map let alone visiting with United frequent flyer miles. (Is it just me or has anyone else ever heard of Niue, a self-governing island near New Zealand? Where exactly is Kyrgyzstan? I'm pretty sure these countries didn't even exist when I was growing up. Now not only do they exist, they've got time on their hands to read humor about Silicon Valley. Weird.) So I'm constantly trying to put all this together and figure out what it means. Frankly I'm flummoxed. Why do we get more visitors from than Macedonia than Latvia? Why is traffic from Iceland on par with Colombia yet far behind Russia and Poland? Do Icelanders laugh less often than Poles? Or maybe their Internet connection is just slower, what with all that ice. And more to the point how do these people find this site? How did we win an award in South Africa when I've never met anyone from there? No wonder I'm having trouble concentrating.  Meanwhile, there are even folks out there translating valley of the geeks into French, Hebrew and more.  Go figure.

Word of Mouth

A lot of our readers have helped promote the site, for which I am grateful. Not as grateful as if they had bought RTFM t-shirts or mugs which actually help underwrite the expense of the site, but still, it's nice that people promote the site in email newsletters, weblogs, and so on. We don't do much to promote the site, so all of the traffic comes from word of mouth communications. If you find something funny, I encourage you to pass it along.  The site has been earned awards and recognition from a variety of indusry insiders. And you can also check out the book Valley of the Geeks, a collection of the best articles and essays from this site, available now.

Our recent drive to increase traffic through word-of-mouth promotion has been widely successful and we have doubled traffic from French Polynesia. Both readers are very happy and we hope that they will come back and visit again soon. In the mean time, we're encouraging more readers from Mauritius, Cook Islands and Aruba so we can conduct a marketing research offsite there. Not sure if they actually have electricity, but if they have beaches and Mai Tai's we can figure something out. If you know people in these areas, please send them email to visit this site.