Our Demographics & Blog-blog-blogging About Food

So, one unexpected occurrence resulting from our switcheroo-to-the-new-bloggeroo was this: in the process we acquired a lot of interesting and valuable information regarding our readership. We received hundreds (about 5 or 600) of emails from people all over the world. After scoping people out, we have invited 460 readers (we’ll continue to add people who want to read along on a case-by-case basis). Anyway, the thing that was so crazy, to me, was not the number of readers but the intensity of the readers— I was shocked to find out that almost all of our readers are reading daily (like, religiously! as part of their daily routine!) and have been for years. Most of them have either been reading since the beginning, or have gone back and read our entire archives. The vast, vast, vast majority of people told us that they had never left a comment. Like, never ever left a comment. Interesting! Anyway, totally by default we found out a ton about our blog readers’ demographics. There are a whole bunch of men reading, but the majority of readers are women– including a total mix of stay-at-home-moms, working-outside-the-home-moms, and women with no kids. The majority of readers are white, but we have a ton more black and Hispanic (and other non-white) readers than I ever imagined. There are lots of families and/or couples who are reading together (and having lots of interesting conversations sparked from here!– I heard about so many of those conversations!). There are large contingents of readers from the following groups (some of you overlap with ‘membership’ in multiple of these groups):

• Adoptive Families (or families considering adoption or in the process of adoption)
• Multiples Families (parents of twins)
• GLBTQ Folks (mostly gay and lesbian couples — some with kids, some thinking about starting families)
• Female Graduate Students (lots o’ PhD students, med students, and law students)
• Teen and Twenty-Something Adoptees (most of them black)
• Heart for Haiti (people who– for whatever reason… and usually there’s a good one… — love Haiti; this includes actual Haitians and Haitian-Americans, as well as non-Haitians who have been touched by Haiti)

There you have it. I’d say that pretty much sums up our readership. The other thing we found out is what people are interested in on our blog. From what y’all told us, I’d say these are the main subjects that most of our readers are reading for (in no particular order):

• Happy-Healthy-Whole-Hearted-Great&Grateful-Living (turns out that people are seriously inspired by this blog… honestly, this was the biggest revelation to me. I had no idea people were so enraptured with this aspect of our blog)
• Adoption (especially inter-racial adoption, especially white-black adoption, especially Haitian adoption)
• Mixed-Race Family Life
• Dual-Career Family Life
• Twinny Twinny Twinship
• Travel
• Foodie Stuff (raising foodie kids, recipes, and ideas for dealing with the whole food/eating challenge in daily living)

I’d say that after the Happy-Healthy-Whole-Hearted-Great&Grateful-Living revelation (which, truly, was a huge revelation to me), the second most surprising thing that I learned in this whole process was that a ton (I mean, a ton) of people are interested in any/all food-related stuff on this blog. I find that amazing, since, from my perspective, we rarely post about food and I’m constantly feeling tortured by the challenge of getting dinner on the table. I feel like we posted a lot on the subject of food during Food Week last year, but other than that I feel like it is pretty much a silent subject on this blog. That is not, however, how a lot of readers see it. The food stuff is a major draw for a lot of readers. And honestly, as much as it does drive me absolutely to the brink of insanity on many (most?) days… I do love thinking about — and trying to mastermind — the whole food thing for my family. So… that made me think, “geesh, I better get going on The 2nd Annual Food Week!!!!!” But then I got to thinking… “maybe I should do more than just one (or two) weeks on this, maybe I should start doing ‘Food Friday’ and posting something related to food once a week?”  Anyway, I’d love to hear what y’all think! I know a lot of you are averse to commenting (LOL!!!), but you could vote… right??… so we created a little poll for you to partake in. Check it out on the top right hand corner of our sidebar. And vote! Your vote counts! (since I’ll go with whatever you all tell me) Poll closes at midnight on Thursday.

P.S. Late edit to this post…  I forgot to mention the most fun tidbit of all about our demographics!— we even have someone really, really, really (like super really) famous reading this blog!!!! I will never say who it is– but I bet y’all will have some fun imagining who it might be!  😉