Meet the family - 'On Line Opinion' reader survey results

We also know that a lot of you read Crikey! (55 per cent). Not only that but Crikey! gets a strong vote for being useful. The net measure of how useful you found the Crikey! website (calculated by subtracting the total of those who said it was “Somewhat unimportant” or “Very unimportant” from that of those who said it was “Somewhat important” of “Very important”) was 31 per cent. For your favourite read, The Australian, that figure is 34 per cent, so Crikey! and The Australian are about line ball. In fact, you liked the SMH site the best as it scored a 38 per cent net figure. The Courier-Mail (and here’s another clue as to why we do so well in Queensland) has a net figure of just 5 per cent.

When it comes to relaxation activities it is no surprise to find 82 per cent of you read. Why else would you be on our site? Around 75 per cent of you also like to listen to music with 54 per cent nominating popular music and 52 per cent classical (half of each group said both). Other things you liked were: restaurants (53 per cent) and wine tasting (38 per cent); and weekend getaways (36 per cent) and overseas tourism (35 per cent). But that doesn’t mean that you are just the indoors types. Thirty-seven per cent were into exercise. However, you are individuals. Only 12 per cent of you play team sport, while a solitary activity like yoga or pilates is at 19 per cent well ahead of golf and tennis (10 per cent), sailing (9 per cent), skiing/snowboarding (7 per cent) or car racing (5 per cent). Extreme Sports scored the lowest at 3 per cent.

Other things you told us about yourself are that you are interested in investments, and more of you are interested in shares (44 per cent) than real estate (37 per cent). You also like to buy online with 82 per cent of you having bought books or CDs over the Internet, and 68 per cent booking travel arrangements.

Of course, we didn’t just want to know about you, we wanted to know what you thought about us. We asked this through a qualitative question and the answers were pretty clear.

Display and format issues were the most commented on - a total of 26 per cent. A major issue for those of you within this group is the paucity of information available from the headlines. You wanted to know more about each article before investing in it by left-clicking with you mouse. This is something that we can address, and we’re already exploring alternative layouts.

Next most common complaint (9 per cent) was that our opinion was not wide enough. I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I’ll be emailing these respondents to find out more. Some gave me some idea with 5 per cent (on top of the 9 per cent) saying they wanted more international material.

Then came advertising (5 per cent) on the site. This is going to be an intractable problem. As we can’t convince enough of you to pay for our service, to keep providing it we need to tap into people who are prepared to pay for the opportunity to try to sell you something.

“Categorisation”, which refers to how we index articles, also had a 5 per cent rate. We’re also going to have a good look at what we do here.

A total of 10 per cent of responses was about the forum. Five per cent complained about rudeness, while another 5 per cent mentioned forum posting rules, particularly the upper-limits on numbers of posts per day. The forum is problematic. It is the most rapidly growing part of the site, but it can be boisterous. We could try to insist on people using their real names, but we’re not sure how practical that is. Perhaps we could more widely publicise the fact we rely on users to report bad behaviour so we can then deal with it. I think we’re unlikely to lift the number of forum posts allowed each day until we increase the number of articles that we publish in a day.

So now we know all about you, and you now know something about what you know about us, as well as who you are. (Hope that’s clear). Thanks for being so generous with your time and energy and making this site such a delight to create and run.