Results of the ATC content preferences survey

I’ve been curious about which types of content are most preferred by those who follow ATC. So I asked, in a survey last week.

I first sent the survey directly to the subscribers of the ATC blog by email list. The next day I posted an almost identical survey (one question omitted, details below) on Twitter. Thanks to everyone who completed the survey. This really helps me to work on topics and types of content that you’ll be able to use.

Response rate

The survey by email was sent to 413 subscribers and got 42 completed survey responses. I’ll count this as a 10% response rate. The tweet with the survey link got 10,206 impressions and led to 64 completed survey responses. I’ll call that a 0.6% response rate. In total, there were 106 completed surveys.

This doesn’t surprise me. I expect the subscribers to the blog by email are some of the most ardent followers of ATC, so I expect a higher response rate there. I also asked the email subscribers to please complete the survey link they received by email, rather than the one on Twitter. I also expect that most of the people who completed the survey through Twitter will have been some of my most ardent followers there. Sure, a few random people may complete surveys just for fun, or for spite, but that will be small.

So I have the results from what I presume are ardent followers of the blog email list, and also ardent followers on Twitter. Now, to the results.

Which type of content do you prefer from ATC?

This was the first question, and the ranking order came back differently depending on the surveyed population. Both groups—the blog email list, and Twitter—chose “blog posts” as the consensus preferred topic. Both chose books as the least preferred.

The table below shows the summary results by group. It’s no surprise that the group receiving an email newsletter of the full text of a blog post would have blog posts and email newsletters as their top choices.

The podcast results were especially interesting. It’s a love/hate type of thing that averages out to those rankings. For the blog email list group, 24% of the respondents had podcasts as their first choice, and next was 21%—as their fourth choice. For the Twitter group, 28% had podcasts as their first choice, and next was 19%—as their fifth choice.

For written content, which do you prefer?

I asked “For blog posts and other written content, if you had a choice, would you prefer?” to the blog email group, and the results were clear.

These results were clear and I omitted this question from the survey link I shared on Twitter.

If you had to choose just one, how would you prefer to get turf content from ATC?

Here again there was a predictable difference, with the group who had already elected to read the email newsletters preferring to read to a stronger degree than did the Twitter group. Reading was still the top preference for both groups.

If I summarize the results for that question across both groups, 48% prefer reading, 26.5% prefer listening, and 25.5% prefer watching.

Have you watched any of the ATC Doublecut or ATC Office Hours episodes on YouTube, or listened to the podcasts?

The results were similar between the groups. The blog email group was 71% yes and 29% no. The Twitter group was 64% yes and 36% no.

For those who answered yes to that question, they got this as a follow-up question.

Would you like to watch or listen to more of this type of content in 2022?

Thanks for helping me out with this, and for all the suggestions of things you’d like to hear more about.

I’ve got tons of things to write about, and I’m glad that so many of you enjoy reading this material. I’m also glad to know that there is interest in video and podcast material too.