A new survey finds that six percent of adult Internet users in the United States say they’ve used Reddit, with the group most active perhaps being no surprise to those familiar with Reddit — young men, ages 18 to 29.
The report is from Pew Internet. In all age categories, Reddit was used by men more than women, and the biggest gap between the two sexes was in the youngest group.
Young Men Like Reddit
Whereas 15% of men aged 18-29 said they use Reddit, only 5% of women said they did, a 3-to-1 ratio. Other age groups have a smaller gap except for 65+ and older, where the percentage of use is so low that the margin of error could swing it either way:
Usage also drops off with age. The 30-49 group is the next highest for using Reddit, with 8% of men and 5% of women saying they go there.
How often do they use Reddit? That’s not covered by this survey. In the full report (PDF), those on the survey were asked simply, “Please tell me if you ever use the Internet to do any of the following things?” Reddit was one of the options, so this includes anyone who has ever gone to Reddit at least once but doesn’t mean that 6% are going each day.
Reddit, Tumblr Behind Other Social Platforms
The report also details how Reddit usage measures up against other social platforms from a previous report. Reddit registers down with Tumblr, behind other social sites like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and much further behind Facebook. The percentage of adult Internet users in the US who say they use any of these platforms:
Facebook: 67%
Twitter: 16%
Pinterest: 15%
Instagram: 13%
Tumblr: 6%
Reddit: 6%
Men Are From Reddit; Women Are From Pinterest?
On those other platforms, the usage of men versus women is generally in balance except for Instagram and especially Pinterest. Facebook also has a gap, but the usage by both sexes is extremely high. How they compare, ordered by ratio of men to women, starting with those services leaning more toward women and ending those leaning more toward men:
Pinterest: 5 to 1 (25% women to 5% men)
Instagram: 1.6 to 1 (16% women to 10% men)
Facebook: 1.2 to 1 (72% women to 62% men)
Tumblr: 1 to 1 (6% women to 6% men)
Twitter: 0.9 to 1 (15% women to 17% men)
Reddit: 0.5 to 1 (4% women to 8% men)
Heavy Hispanic Use & No High School Diploma Required
The study also provided a full demographic breakdown. Hispanics are shown as by far the biggest racial group reporting use of the service (11% of all adult Internet users, versus 5% for Whites and 4% for Blacks). My assumption is that Asian wasn’t, oddly, an option that those taking the survey could select. I’m checking on this.
Interestingly, the survey also found the service has the highest use by those with no high school diploma (9%) rather than those with some college (6%) or college degrees (75). It’s hard to compare that to some of the other services that Pew has data on, however, because previous reports combined figures of those who had some high school education with high school graduates.
Still, with Facebook, users are far more likely to have some college education than not. The same is true for Pinterest. With the other services, the gap is much closer. The breakdown:
Postscript: Here’s what Pew sent me regarding the high-use of Reddit by Hispanics (short answer, it doesn’t know, and it happens with other social media sites) and Asians not being on the survey (short answer: they are surveyed, considered representative within the entire overall group, but when broken out, numbers are so small on their own that there are issues with margins of error and confidence).
Latinos: The field dates for this particular survey coincided with a sustained social media outreach campaign around the immigration bill currently being debated by Congress. At the same time, all of our figures for social media usage by Latinos were higher than we typically see. At the moment we aren’t sure if that increase is a temporary blip due to the immigration campaign, or if this is the beginning of a sustained trend. We’ll need to collect some additional data and watch this moving forward before we can say for sure one way or another. Re Asians: The short answer is that the number of Asian-American respondents we get in a single survey is typically too small to report on individually and have any confidence in our figures (although their responses are incorporated into our overall figures). The much more detailed answer can be found in a blog we wrote up a couple of months ago.
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