[Air-l] viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

[Nancy Baym]

Today, I was pointed to the Quantcast data on FB users by someone 
arguing against the perception/claim that FB is "quite white."

http://www.quantcast.com/facebook.com

I did a quick comparison with the MySpace data:

http://www.quantcast.com/myspace.com

When you compare the FB and MySpace demographics on Quantcast, the 
notion that there is a class difference between FB and Myspace users 
is supported (though obviously there are plenty of people from most 
classes on each site):

Quantcast presents the data as bar charts that compare the 
demographics of a site's users to the internet population in general.

The FB bars get bigger (i.e. greater representation on FB compared to 
the overall internet population) the higher the household income, 
while the MySpace bars get smaller. The MySpace levels are much 
closer to one another across income levels, while there is a big 
disparity in FB users at different income levels.

FB users are also evidently more likely to be more educated than 
MySpacers (not surprising given its college origins).

The non-white part is less clear. Overall, it does look like FB is 
more white, but African-Americans seem to be better represented on FB 
than on MySpace. FB has proportionally more African Americans than 
MySpace. On the other hand, FB has comparatively far fewer hispanics 
or "others" than does MySpace. Asians's comparative presence about 
the same on both sites.

I would be interested in hearing what people know about Quantcast 
data -- where does it come from? how reliable is it? etc.

Ironically, the day before danah posted her essay, a friend in London 
wrote on another space I frequent "What I want to know is where are 
the non white people on FB......infact FB is pretty boring [...] 
MySpazz is chaotic and a mess.... i like it, FB is way too bland."

In more local news, the AoIR facebook group topped 200 members today, 
which I guess is about 15% of the list subscribers (though there are 
a few in the FB group who aren't here).

Nancy