Reader demographic surveys

[astroboysandeep]

Hi all, I’ve been an author on Lit for about 5 years and have published about 20+ stories. In all this time it never occurred to me to understand more about my readers: their background, their preferences, the way they end up at my stories etc. So I decided to create a survey form on google forms where people can anonymously fill out these details (feel free to check it out and let me know what you think).

I recently submitted a story with a link to the survey but it was sent back because you’re not allowed to post outside links within the body of the text, as outlined in the content guidelines:

• Works that contain advertisements, outside links, domain names, or outside promotions of any kind within the description, body text, or audio (including “See my profile for…”)

Admittedly, it was my bad, so I’m going to take the link out and resubmit. However, I do want to direct readers to the survey so they can choose to tell me about themselves. The only loophole I see around this specific rule is to post the link in the comments after the story.

What I’d like to know is whether any of you have tried to conduct such anonymised surveys in the past using google forms or other platforms, how did you do it and what was the response? Literotica is all about anonymity for the authors and readers and I respect that deeply, but that leaves authors staring at a blank wall when it comes to understanding their readership, where their preferences lie and what resonates with them in our stories. Comments, favourites and ratings only go so far in painting that picture, we need something that’s more targeted. At the end of the day, we want to give the readers what they want and also scratch that itch for validation when publishing a story. Demographic surveys are a key tool to help us point in the right direction.

Eager to hear your thoughts and suggestions

 

[NotWise]

This comes up now and then, and it came up recently. You can link your story to your Lit profile and put the link to your survey in your author bio.

Good luck.

 

[astroboysandeep]

This comes up now and then, and it came up recently. You can link your story to your Lit profile and put the link to your survey in your author bio.

Good luck.

Thanks, I’ve just done that. Keen to hear from people who have conducted such surveys previously

 

[Bamagan]

Hi all, I’ve been an author on Lit for about 5 years and have published about 20+ stories. In all this time it never occurred to me to understand more about my readers: their background, their preferences, the way they end up at my stories etc. So I decided to create a survey form on google forms where people can anonymously fill out these details (feel free to check it out and let me know what you think).

I recently submitted a story with a link to the survey but it was sent back because you’re not allowed to post outside links within the body of the text, as outlined in the content guidelines:



Admittedly, it was my bad, so I’m going to take the link out and resubmit. However, I do want to direct readers to the survey so they can choose to tell me about themselves. The only loophole I see around this specific rule is to post the link in the comments after the story.

What I’d like to know is whether any of you have tried to conduct such anonymised surveys in the past using google forms or other platforms, how did you do it and what was the response? Literotica is all about anonymity for the authors and readers and I respect that deeply, but that leaves authors staring at a blank wall when it comes to understanding their readership, where their preferences lie and what resonates with them in our stories. Comments, favourites and ratings only go so far in painting that picture, we need something that’s more targeted. At the end of the day, we want to give the readers what they want and also scratch that itch for validation when publishing a story. Demographic surveys are a key tool to help us point in the right direction.

Eager to hear your thoughts and suggestions

As mentioned above, the only real option is to put the link on your bio/profile. You can mention the existence of the link in the story, and even link to your profile (although that's fairly redundant since readers can click on your name anyway). Comments are moderated, and I'm pretty sure links are treated as spam by a filter, although they might only be flagged for human moderation and sometimes allowed.

 

[Bramblethorn]

In which Bramblethorn is a killjoy again...

I took a quick look at the survey; seeing all the questions required me to fill in info, and since I wasn't comfortable providing my own personal info here I had to put in some dummy answers. Please ignore the results from the 40-ish person whose gender identity is reported as "survey design enthusiast". Sorry about that.

A few comments:

The intro states "this is a completely anonymous survey", but if somebody attempts to complete it while logged in to Google, it will associate their responses with their Google login by default. This is not "completely anonymous"!

The first option in your "how old are you?" question reads:

Younger than 18 (naughty!!! but who am I to judge, I've been reading stories on literotica since I was 12)

Most surveys of this nature explicitly exclude under-18s from scope, because many countries have laws restricting the collection of data from minors and it's really easy to end up in violation of these laws if you don't have that kind of exclusion. Everybody knows that some minors will ignore the "no under 18s sign" but explicitly including this category in the design makes it clear that you fully intend to collect data from minors, and the commentary on this option could be taken as encouraging people as young as 12 to participate. This is a very very bad idea.

Your age categories include "25-35", "35-45" and "45-55". It's not clear how 35- and 45-year-olds are supposed to answer. As well as being a problem in itself, this is a "brown M&Ms" thing: if somebody doesn't know to avoid having overlapping categories for a question like this, they're not somebody I'd trust to look after sensitive personal data.

(And while you're not collecting direct identifiers like name and address, the info you're collecting is enough that some people may be identifiable by their responses.)

A lot of your answer options have editorial comments included, e.g. for sexual orientation, "Heterosexual (boring!)" This is a big no-no if you're trying to get accurate data, and another "brown M&Ms" thing. If your survey ends up showing a relatively small number of straight people, there'll be no way to tell whether that accurately reflects the population you're surveying, or if a bunch of straight folk noped out of the survey when they got to this one.

"Which part of the world are you from?" - this is ambiguous (are you asking people where they were born, where they were raised, where they live now?) and the options are incomplete. What you've done here is provide a list of continents, but not everybody lives on a continent! For instance, there's no option here for New Zealanders.

For this kind of thing, rather than trying to roll your own, I'd encourage looking at professionally-designed surveys that ask similar questions and seeing how they handle it.

"How often do you frequent Literotica?" - options are incomplete, e.g. nothing for somebody who only reads once every three months, and "frequent" is ambiguous - do you mean reading stories, participating in forum chat, ...?

"Which story of mine did you read today?" - some people may have read more than one, or none. If the "nones" are out of scope, that's fine, but that should be made clear at the start of the survey not on the second page.

"What are your top 5 Story Tags?" - this is a mandatory question, but some readers don't even know tags exist.

The second-last question invites readers to leave their email address in order to get monthly newsletters from you - again, this is not "completely anonymous"! At least it's opt-in here, but if you want to offer anonymity in the survey, don't then invite people to provide personal identifiers!

 

[astroboysandeep]

In which Bramblethorn is a killjoy again...

I took a quick look at the survey; seeing all the questions required me to fill in info, and since I wasn't comfortable providing my own personal info here I had to put in some dummy answers. Please ignore the results from the 40-ish person whose gender identity is reported as "survey design enthusiast". Sorry about that.

A few comments:

The intro states "this is a completely anonymous survey", but if somebody attempts to complete it while logged in to Google, it will associate their responses with their Google login by default. This is not "completely anonymous"!

The first option in your "how old are you?" question reads:


Most surveys of this nature explicitly exclude under-18s from scope, because many countries have laws restricting the collection of data from minors and it's really easy to end up in violation of these laws if you don't have that kind of exclusion. Everybody knows that some minors will ignore the "no under 18s sign" but explicitly including this category in the design makes it clear that you fully intend to collect data from minors, and the commentary on this option could be taken as encouraging people as young as 12 to participate. This is a very very bad idea.

Your age categories include "25-35", "35-45" and "45-55". It's not clear how 35- and 45-year-olds are supposed to answer. As well as being a problem in itself, this is a "brown M&Ms" thing: if somebody doesn't know to avoid having overlapping categories for a question like this, they're not somebody I'd trust to look after sensitive personal data.

(And while you're not collecting direct identifiers like name and address, the info you're collecting is enough that some people may be identifiable by their responses.)

A lot of your answer options have editorial comments included, e.g. for sexual orientation, "Heterosexual (boring!)" This is a big no-no if you're trying to get accurate data, and another "brown M&Ms" thing. If your survey ends up showing a relatively small number of straight people, there'll be no way to tell whether that accurately reflects the population you're surveying, or if a bunch of straight folk noped out of the survey when they got to this one.

"Which part of the world are you from?" - this is ambiguous (are you asking people where they were born, where they were raised, where they live now?) and the options are incomplete. What you've done here is provide a list of continents, but not everybody lives on a continent! For instance, there's no option here for New Zealanders.

For this kind of thing, rather than trying to roll your own, I'd encourage looking at professionally-designed surveys that ask similar questions and seeing how they handle it.

"How often do you frequent Literotica?" - options are incomplete, e.g. nothing for somebody who only reads once every three months, and "frequent" is ambiguous - do you mean reading stories, participating in forum chat, ...?

"Which story of mine did you read today?" - some people may have read more than one, or none. If the "nones" are out of scope, that's fine, but that should be made clear at the start of the survey not on the second page.

"What are your top 5 Story Tags?" - this is a mandatory question, but some readers don't even know tags exist.

The second-last question invites readers to leave their email address in order to get monthly newsletters from you - again, this is not "completely anonymous"! At least it's opt-in here, but if you want to offer anonymity in the survey, don't then invite people to provide personal identifiers!

Hi Bramblethorn, thanks for taking the time and giving detailed feedback on the survey questions. I’ll have to make some tweaks as you have pointed out. Really appreciate it!