What is the collective audience of the Huffington Post and how does being online affect this?
According to statistics provided by Quantcast (all figures accurate as of May 2011) The Huffington Posts' readers are overwhelmingly American, overwhelmingly white and are generally made up of mid-to-high earners, with 49% earning over 30k per year and 36% in the 100k+ wage bracket.
It is fair to say that the publication seems to attract young professionals of both sexes, with men and women spread more or less evenly at 53% and 47% respectively. Only 19% of its readers are parents and only 31% are not educated to a college level or higher.
As noted above its readership is predominantly white with 86% of its 6.1million global audience being classified as caucasian. Outside of the USA, Canada hosts the second largest readership with Great Britain, australia and India providing the rest.
The way The Huffington Post combines news, opinion and aggregated content appears to appeal to those with an interest in a variety of news content and ease of navigation, allowing particular focus on business and sports. This is backed by figures showing other sites Huffington Post readers visit, including NBCSports.com, Sportsnetwork.com, Wonkette and Democracynow.org.
So what do these figures tell us about The Huffington Post as an exclusively online publication?
We could argue that many office based professionals would prefer to gather their news whilst at their computers or on the move, using Smartphones and other such devises. This kind of approach would suite the Posts' layout and model as 'Dailyme' style news can be got at with ease using the subject drop down menus as apposed to traditional newspaper layouts.
However, although over a quarter of global and American audiences access The Post from their place of work, the other 75% (approx) are reading from home, suggesting that not only does it fulfil the important, hard news, needs of its readers but the entertainment and lifestyle content is also popular with websites such as Rolling Stone, TMZ and The Superficial also showing to be popular among readers.
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