Mashable vs. Business Insider Readers: What the Data Tells Us
Our goal at StatSocial is to break down and make sense of the billions of social web interactions and activities that go on each day.
Media companies work with StatSocial to understand the audiences behind their earned media engagements — so that they can align their media with the right advertisers and produce the most engaging content. With some digging (and with the help of our sophisticated audience insights), we are able to discover meaningful patterns among the unstructured social web, bringing to life their customers’ most important needs, interests, affinities and values.
In this overview of uniquely social insights only available through StatSocial, we take a deep look at the most avid consumers of Mashable and Business Insider. For this analysis, we analyzed over one hundred thousand people who recently shared articles from these publications on their social feeds. Below is a summary of what we learned.
One a media and entertainment news company, the other a source of financial, business, and political affairs, with editorial contact that often overlaps, direct competitors Mashable and Business Insider square off for readership.
Both cover the latest in tech and current affairs — and, at first glance, the differences between their readerships appear subtle, almost indistinguishable. Understanding their social media audiences (those sharing content from the respective sites), opens the door to understanding the audiences beyond basic demographics and reach statistics. In this article, StatSocial will dig into and describe what makes Mashable and Business Insider audiences unique from one another.
A closer look at Mashable readers
Predictably, Mashable readers are tech-obsessed. They also tend to be younger and more politically progressive than Business Insider readers. Although both companies attract tech-savvy audiences in their 40s and 50s, a large portion of Mashable readers take form as a new hybrid of urbanite hipster-nerds in their 20s and 30s. This younger crowd has a penchant for alternative music, online comedy series (think: Portlandia), and all things sci-fi. When they’re not living and breathing Marvel or DC Comics, the twenty-something readers unique to Mashable are teaching themselves critical coding and software development skills via online tutorials, such as Andela, HTML Dog, Khan Academy and the like. It doesn’t stop there: from online languages to graphic design to life lessons from TED-Ed, these ambitious go-getters are striving for self-enhancement in every which way.
A closer look at Business Insider readers
Although Business Insider readers are less inclined to participate in online education (understandably so due to a generational gap), they nonetheless demonstrate an above-average curiosity and savvy about technology.
Unlike their more liberal female counterparts, male readers of Business Insider are unquestionably more politically conservative than the typical male Mashable reader, evidenced by their interest in rightward-leaning authors, TV hosts, and news commentators. These men, in their 40s and 50s, are less likely to live in dense urban areas. On a typical day, you’ll find these GOP loyalists watching hosts and political commentators on Fox News or CNN.
More Alike Than Different
Mashable and Business Insider audiences overlap on a number of characteristics, proving that the two are not mutually exclusive when it comes to readership.
At their core, both audiences over-index towards males in their 30s, 40s and 50s, with upper-level income ranges of $50–100K and above. These men and women tend to be city dwellers (or at least a short commute away), with an over-index towards Asian, Multiracial, and White backgrounds.
Both Mashable and Business Insider readers demonstrate an interest in news and current affairs through their heavy consumption of CNN, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, to name a few. However, Business Insider readers take their interest in politics one step further in seeking out a larger set of online news sources across the political spectrum, such as Breitbart News Network, Daily Kos, Media Matters, PolitiFact, Politico, Reuters Top News, Slate, The Raw Story, and Vox.
Meanwhile, Mashable readers plunge even deeper into the world of technology. Although both audiences are also avid readers of TechCrunch, those who prefer Mashable spend more time pouring over tech news and reviews from Digital Trends, Engadget, Gizmodo, and The Next Step.
Personality
Thanks to the integration of IBM Watson into our unique data analytics, StatSocial reports can also break down an audience by personality.
More specifically, the Big Five Personality traits.
“The Big Five”
Let’s pause for a brief Psych 101. According to psychologists, there are five pillars of personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Extraversion. These “Big Five” traits rest on a spectrum of high Agreeableness to low Agreeableness, Extraversion to Introversion, and so on. Beyond these umbrella categories rest a myriad of subcategories, such as “Intellect” under Openness and “Dutifulness” under Conscientiousness.
How it works
IBM Watson’s Personality Insights® tool uses this criterion to assess Big Five traits, as well as the higher ranked Needs and Values, in specific social audiences. StatSocial provides the goods — thousands of expertly collected social media activities and interactions — and IBM Watson uses their sophisticated linguistic analytics to create a personality score for each user based on their content.
What we’ve learned
Mashable and Business Insider readers are both Conscientious and Open to new experiences. Both tend to act in an organized or thoughtful way, with a strong drive for excellence (“Achievement-Seeking”) and a habit of deliberating before acting (“Cautiousness”). Both also rank average for Self-discipline, or the ability to exercise willpower, and Self-efficacy.
When it comes to Openness, the two readerships tend to think abstractly, let their imagination run wild, seek new experiences, and challenge convention. Emotional awareness is not one their strong suits, and they do not have a particularly artistic outlook on life. Readers also rank exceptionally low on Neuroticism, reflecting a good handle on negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, impulsiveness, vulnerability to stress, and depression or melancholy.
Delving deeper into specific StatSocial clusters, the techie crowd of both sites are considerably less Neurotic and more Open and Extraverted than the typical individual. Although Mashable and Business Insider readers rank low in Agreeableness (or compassion and cooperation towards others), the Agreeable are in even shorter supplies when it comes to the cluster of city-dwelling, liberal female readers dominating both sites.
Why this matters
Creating customer profiles is an especially important marketing strategy used to identify a target audience. A customer profile is a description of your ideal customer that extends beyond age and geolocation. This includes preferred media channels (i.e., Facebook, social media, email, TV), likes/dislikes, consumer patterns, and brand preferences. To round out a customer profile, you must understand your customers’ habits and preferences on an individual level, and at scale. Find out what makes your customers tick — their basic traits, needs, and values — and you’re on the right track.
Consumer Habits
Of Mashable Readers
When they’re not reading Mashable, they’re playing Cities XXL, Master of Orion, and Armored Warfare — and their adventurousness in video gaming translates to their TV preferences. Mashable readers seek the thrill from HBO’s favorite fantasy drama, “Game of Thrones,” MTV’s superhero series “Sweet/Vicious,” and BBC’s period drama “The Musketeers.”
These readers exhibit less interest in fashion and style, especially compared to their love of the latest in tech and consumer electronics. From state-of-the-art Dynaudio loudspeakers to Sono wireless home sound systems to Libratone Bluetooth-connected headphones — Mashable readers are passionate about music.
When it comes to communication, these tech-junkies prefer mobile phones (iPhones, Blackberrys, or Nokias) over tablets. These smartphones are full of productivity apps, like “EasilyDo” and messaging and project management platforms, like “WhatsApp” and “Trello.” These techies mean business.
When they’re not surfing through TV channels on mobile app, “TVCatchup,” they’re refining their photography skills (as evidenced by their love of Konica Minolta, Profoto, and Olympus cameras). They surprisingly show no brand preference for mainstream Canon and Kodak nor hipster Polaroid.
Consumer Habits of Business Insider Readers
Compared to Mashable readers, Business Insider readers are more likely to use tablets to read the news. They also appreciate high-end audio from Naim Audio and Libratone, as well as consumer electronics from Sharp US and Bang & Olufsen. Their readers enjoy recording their TV shows on TiVo for later indulgence. Business Insider readers demonstrate their interest in finance and are keeping up with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Blockchain, as well as investments/brokerage with companies like Goldman Sachs, PIMCO, Investec, JP Morgan, and Nordea.
When it comes to TV, we know Mashable readers love anything falling into the genres of action, adventure, superhero, sci-fi and fantasy. However, Business Insider readers show little interest in these topics. Instead, you’ll find them viewing national news coverage (such as on 60 Minutes, A Current Affair, AM Joy, and BBC News Night, and Going Underground), as well as intentional coverage (such as on Democracy Now!, FRANCE 24, Global News 16x9, Latin Pulse Podcast, The Drum, and The Roast).
Let’s wrap it up
Two tech and media news sites: Mashable and Business Insider. On the surface, they share considerable demographic similarities. Yet, a closer look beyond age and geolocation reveals an important difference between consumer habits and preferences.
Discovering these idiosyncrasies—running as broad as a favorite movie genre and as specific as a favorite mobile app — is the key to better understanding customers, both for media buyers and sellers. StatSocial helps media sellers leverage these insights to optimize pitches and RFP responses. On the media buying side, StatSocial is the most detailed planning tool in the market today.
It’s all out there. The data existed before we came along, and there’s an endless supply of it. We just know how to use it — how to collect it, organize it, and funnel it out in order to make sense of it and help understanding target audiences a lot easier.
For more information, visit StatSocial and take a look around. There you will find links to sample reports, and much more.