This is an immense amount of fun: YouGov have automated their profiling tool.

The Profiler is based on the results of the (enormous and ongoing) YouGov surveys. With 190,000 respondents, it has some serious merit to it, although the sample sizes do get small when it comes to niche interests (like, say, many types of genre fiction).

The Profiler also doesn't show the "typical" member of a given group. Instead, it tries to compare like with like and highlight any differences. The example they give is that if you research Downton Abbey, it compares the results to everyone who has rated any TV show.

So with the subsets of fiction (shown below), we can probably assume that these are highlighting the differences in comparison to folks that selected that they like any sort of book.

This also leads to some oddities, as it is about that relative difference. Again, a YouGov example: many of the football teams are represented by a female character. This does not necessarily mean that most of the team's fans are female - it signifies that, compared to other football teams, that particular team 'overscores' for more female fans.

It is also worth noting that the panel only includes adults age 18+. Which, especially with genre fiction, means we're missing a big chunk of the audience.

So, basically, caveat. In the actual-for-real-work-day-job, I use this tool (amongst many others), but only as inspiration or direction, and certainly not as a definitive portrait of a specific consumer audience.

All that said, it is a lot of fun, and wonderfully simple to use. You can learn more about how it works here.



Anyway, let's get to it, and see how fans of different genres compare: