By David Gewirtz
One of the most important pieces of information a magazine editor can have is a comprehensive understanding of his readership. Put simply, the more we know about you, the better we can focus our editorial content to meet your needs and interests.
Because of its enterprise focus, we know our PalmPower Magazine Enterprise Edition readers are more business-oriented than our consumer readers in PalmPower. But we really didn't know who you were, where you worked, or what you did.
To find out, we undertook a rather intense analysis of our log data. We were able to find out, with a startling degree of accuracy, how many of you are out there and where you probably work. But we still don't know what you do. That's because we don't force you to fill out forms before accessing the magazine, and we don't do any intrusive tricks like drop cookies or otherwise pry into your life.
Over the next few pages, I'm going to share with you what we found out about you. That's the "I'll show you mine" part. Then I'm going to ask you to send me, voluntarily, a bunch of emails telling me about what you do to help us get an even better picture of who you all are. That's the "show me yours" part of this piece.
In brief, we discovered some very interesting facts:
- Traceable readership is, at minimum, nearly 70,000, a verifiable increase from our previous estimate of 20,000;
- IBM is our single largest reader in terms of employees;
- 17% of our readers come from outside the U.S.;
- We have strong penetration into a whole bunch of blue-chip markets.
As you can see, the content of the analysis is exciting. We actually have three and a half times more readers than we originally thought. And, unlike our previous efforts, which were estimates, this number is based on verifiable, unique users reading the magazine.
Enormous purchasing power
These numbers are very interesting, especially if we look at the potential purchasing power of all of you. Some months ago, we tried to figure out how much of a budget each of you influences.
To do this, we looked at some estimates by other publishers. O'Reilly, for example, provides some estimates of their readers' purchasing power for software. According to them, 30% of their readers have budgets between $250,000 and $1 million, while another 28% have budgets over a million dollars. And that's just the software side of technology purchases!
Advisor Publications, a company that publishes a wide range of computer technology magazines, estimates a tools/equipment budget of $1.86 million per reader company.
