And the third installment of “Top 20 Interests According to Facebook”.

Top 20 Interests According to Facebook: UK Edition

Hockey may be Canada’s national sport, but we’re not as passionate about hockey as Americans are about football or the Brits are about soccer.

Consider this:
Hockey in Canada Males: 133,580, Females: 40,220 (approx 3.25:1 ratio)
Football (soccer) in the UK Males:  229,960, Females: 23,780 (approx 10:1 ratio)
Football in the US Males: 472,200, Females: 101,680 (almost a 5:1 ratio)

As a % of  Facebook population:
Football/soccer in the UK: 0.036%
Football in the US: 0.032%
Hockey in Canada: 0.026

In the new year, Australia. I wonder how hockey ranks there…

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This caught my attention today.

This, from Slate Magazine’s Human Nature column:

Australian doctors proposed a carbon tax on couples for procreating. Current policy: To promote population growth, Australia pays each couple about $3,500 per baby. Counterproposal: “Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behavior, a ‘Baby Levy’ in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle.” Details: You get two kids free; thereafter, you pay a $4,400 tax at birth, plus $350 to $700 per year “for the life of the child.” Rationales: 1) This is a conservative estimate of the cost of planting enough trees to offset your kid’s carbon effects. 2) “Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, we should control the population to ensure the survival of the environment.” 3) “We deserve no more population concessions than those in India and China.” The good news: You’d get a carbon tax credit for using birth control.

And from David Attenborough in a letter to a colleague:

I agree very much with your central concept that many of the world’s most grievous afflictions can be attributed to population growth: the unprecedented increase in numbers of one species – humans – whose environmental impact threatens the habitats and the very existence of nearly all others, in both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. This process certainly cannot continue indefinitely without bringing about global catastrophe. When the facts are incontrovertible and the conclusions inescapable; when success could bring a vast improvement in the welfare and happiness of millions; and when the penalty of failure is global disaster: surely humanity will want to collaborate and make sure that sanity prevails.

As I said at the end of my last TV series “The Life of Mammals”: maybe it is time that instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, we should control the population to ensure the survival of the environment.

We live in a world where growth is good - in fact, much of the time, it’s the only yardstick for success. How long can growth keep up? Is growth good? We’ve proved that we can’t manage it, and that we can override the natural mechanisms for controlling growth. Are government incentives - baby bonuses, etc. - the first thing to cut for a strong environmental policy? Another argument against state social welfare?

Discuss.

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The monkeysphere has sooo many implications. Read David Wong’s Inside the Monkeysphere for the full account. Very concise and very approachable - and hilarious!

The essence of the monkeysphere is that we are biologically wired to maintain a functional social sphere of about 150 people - neighbours, family, coworkers, friends, etc. Beyond your monkeysphere, people become acquaintances and than strangers.

I’ve argued before that the people with 2000 Facebook friends don’t really have ‘friends’ but a large collection of superficial acquaintances; I wonder about the levels of interaction with all of those people. Anecdotally, a co-worker of mine said that when he went from 50 friends to 75 friends on Facebook, he stopped reading the newsfeed - it was too much to keep up with.

I’ve also talked about comment trolls - the people who show up for one day and leave nasty comments on your blog (blog rage). The question always comes up - why? Why do people feel that they can say hurtful things? I say it’s because you are outside their monkeysphere; you are just another piece of meat to them - they wouldn’t say thing like that to people in their monkeysphere. Think about this the next time you’re driving. Would you scream at other drivers the way you do if you actually knew them? Especially if they were in your monkeysphere? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Problems in the world? Too many people for our monkeysphere:

The primary difference is that monkeys are happy to stay in small groups and rarely interact with others outside their monkey gang. This is why they rarely go to war, though when they do it is widely thought to be hilarious. Humans, however, require cars and oil and quality manufactured goods by the fine folks at 3M and Japanese video games and worldwide internets and, most importantly, governments. All of these things take groups larger than 150 people to maintain effectively. Thus, we routinely find ourselves functioning in bunches larger than our primate brains are able to cope with.

This is where the problems begin. Like a fragile naked human pyramid, we are simultaneously supporting and resenting each other. We bitch out loud about our soul-sucking job as an anonymous face on an assembly line, while at the exact same time riding in a car that only an assembly line could have produced. It’s a constant contradiction that has left us pissed off and joining informal wrestling clubs in basements.

I’m pretty excited about the monkeysphere - it’s one of those rare moments of pure cognitive crystallization.

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Imagine you are driving down the road in the summer with the windows down, a legally purchased CD playing at a reasonable volume on the stereo. Later that week, you get sued by an organization for broadcasting a public performance of the work and they want fees for the artist. Laughable? Not really:

Car maintenance chain Kwik Fit is currently tied up in a bitter legal battle with the UK Performing Rights Society (PRS). It’s alleged that Kwik Fit’s mechanics allowed their radios to be played within earshot of the public - a truly heinous crime for which the PRS are demanding £200,000 in damages.

And if that isn’t ridiculous enough, a charity is being sued because children were singing Christmas carols without the proper license.

Did you know you can’t sing “Happy Birthday” in public? Yup - it’s copyrighted.

Are the organizations that police copyright infringement (ASCAP, PRS, etc.) getting carried away here?

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Another sampling of interests according to Facebook. This week, we look at six American cities. (see last week’s Canadian Interests (via Facebook)).

US interests according to Facebook

Keep in mind that the US users in the 18-24 category are disproportionally represented compared to other countries.

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More stats from Facebook. See the last post for interest trends in Canadian cities, and the post that caught my interest.

Here are some basic demographics - age group and country. It’s pretty basic information, but there are a couple of interesting things here when we compare the US, Canada and the UK.

Facebook Age Spread for USA, Canada and UK

I would assume the 18-24 year old US spike is indicative of Facebook’s origins in American college and university life. While 18-24 year olds in Canada and the UK still show the greatest number of users, I’d suspect this is due more to web and trend literacy than anything else.

Canada shows more users in the 30-39 group than the 25-29 group. I admit that the 30-39 group spans 10 years rather than 5, but the US and UK both show decreases from one category to the next. I’d say that Facebook is seen as a significantly different tool in Canada than it is in the US.

From 30-64, there are more Facebookers in Canada than the US and UK, even though the population of Canada is significantly lower than the US or UK. I wonder if population density has anything to do with Facebook’s popularity in Canada in this group. Could Facebook be popular for relationship management in countries with low population density and high population mobility?

Any other insights or comments?

Tomorrow, education trends.

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 As a follow-up to Buzz Canuck’s interesting Interests by Canadian City (Through the Lense of Facebook), I’ve done my own matrix of interests on Facebook using the ad building tool (you can target your ad by demographic). I used basic keywords that people use in their own profiles, and used Sean’s list of interests, plus a few random interests. I chose the 18-to-any age group, and no other criteria other than city network and interest keyword.

Read yesterday’s post and discussion here.

My results differ from his, due, I suspect, to different data-gathering techniques. Still, it paints an interesting portrait of Canadian’s interests.

We don’t like snow, but Montrealers and Vancouverites like snow better than woodworking.

Facebook Interest Matrix (click for full size)

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Well, according to this chart tracing the interests of Canadian Facebook users, yes. Movies, photography and travelling beats hockey too (except in Winnipeg and Calgary. Go Flames!). Interests by Canadian City (Through the Lense of Facebook) at Buzz Canuck

The fascinating part of this for me is how we all seem to have the same top interest (music), then reading, then movies. For the top three items, the chart is quite consistent across the country; as we go down, the interests by city become quite diverse. Even though we’re pretty similar at the top, our regional differences are quite pronounced in the bottom half. I’d be interested to know if this is representative of the Facebook user demographic or if this is consistent across the broader population? Anthropologists?

Note to Sean: I’d like to know either your methodology in creating this chart or the source of this chart.

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Things that go on behind the scenes of advertising, marketing, filmmaking and other industries where illusion is crucial.

When the illusion fails, it ends up in Consumer Reports “Selling It” feature  :)

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Hi Doug,

You can stop crying for your industry. I saw Kevin Nalts’ wonderful Ten Lessons for Marketers Using Viral Videos. Comes as a sweet relief after Dan Ackerman Greenburg’s horrible The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos. The White Hat rides again!

Cheers,
Dave

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