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Writing for postcount
Audience: extraordinary atomicans
POSTcount@atomican.net is aimed squarely at an audience of atomicans. But who are these atomicans? What characteristics define them other than their participation in the atomican online community?
The best answer to these questions comes from my previous project, “The extraordinary atomican”. In this project I asked 150 or so atomicans about 150 questions and graphed and analysed their responses. The results of this survey provide a keen insight into POSTcount's intended audience.
Here is a selection of the results. Analysing these results gives us a good idea of the style and direction the e-zine should go in.
Firstly we can see that our intended audience is predominantly male (fig 1). There is a large age spread, but is predominantly made up of young adults(fig 2), who live with in suburbia (fig 3) their parents and are more likely to have just moved out into a rental situation than to have settled down with a mortgage(fig 4). Predictably, they are also generally single (fig 5) with no children (fig 6). From this we could assume our audience is quite carefree. Supported by a high overall satisfaction with life (fig 7).
Our audience are slightly more left in their political leanings (fig 8), and have only a general interest in current affairs, but are more likely to be interested in international affairs than local (fig 9, 10, 11). They place a large importance on family (fig 12) and education (fig 13), and are most probably students or full-time employees (fig 14), showing they are quite traditional in their values and approach to life.
A good hint on the style of magazine can be gleamed by looking at the type of magazine's atomican's read (fig 15). Computer / tech scored well above all others (predictable from a community surrounding a computer / tech magazine), and motoring, gaming and men's interest magazines were the only genre's to appear above the median line. This suggest POSTcount should definitely have a lot of tech article's and much lowbrow male humor and interest.
Atomicans really become extraordinary when you look at their tech statistics. They generally have high level of technical knowledge (fig 16), broadband connections (fig 17) and a number (fig 18) of powerful computers (fig 19, 20). The articles then can be free to assume a certain level of technical understanding of the audience and needn't be bogged down explaining basic concepts. The overall site can also be somewhat free to be slightly bandwidth hungry and assume that the majority of users that can easily handle multimedia components.
We can also see that Atomican's spend many hours both behind a PC and online (fig 21, 22), and generally visit the Atomic forums on a daily basis (fig 23). We can therefore assume that a good many of our target audience are going to both discover the existence of the POSTcount (through posts made on the atomic forums) and are actually going to have the time and opportunity to explore it, hopefully a good thing. When connected Atomicans are most likely to be doing research (fig 24). So long as the articles are fresh and well written, It should be no problem keeping our audience engaged in POSTcount.