Bill Cammack

Are women funny?

My sister Liz is funny, but that’s because she’s my sister and we share superior genes. Kim will catch you out there with a slew of punchlines if you get on her nerves, FRLZ, and I think Mel’s probably pretty mentally dangerous in a snap-fest, but, overall… are women FUNNY?

I know there are female comedians, and I’ve been laughing incessantly over how I can’t tell Tina Fey apart from Sarah Palin,

but… in general… are women funny? And if so… Is there “Male Humor” and “Female Humor”?

I’m thinking about this because I watched / listened to a panel of bigwigs in the internet comedy space yesterday. After they spoke, they had a Q&A session, and my homegirl Kathryn Jones got her hands on the mic…. RUH ROHHHH!!! :D

Kathryn Jones & Bill Cammack

So, basically, Kathryn asked “Where is the content BY women and the content FOR women?” and the answer was “um, uh, um, uh, um…” hahahahaha :D Kathryn’s been asking this question ever since I met her, so as soon as I saw her get the mic, I was like AWWWWW HERE WE GO!!!!! :D

The answers made sense, business-wise, and the thing to remember is that this internet stuff is business for them, not art or entertainment. If you do “art” and nobody watches it or buys ads on your content, you get fired. If you do business, and it’s the same business over and over, you get advertising dollars and you keep your job.

Basically, they said they have a demographic and they cater to it. Business 101. If the people watching your content is GUYS, then you make more content that GUYS would like so that they tell MORE GUYS to watch your videos and you grow your community and make more money.

Rocketboom had a study done a while back, which IIRC determined that a whopping 8% of their viewership was female. Of course, that has to do with Eye Candy, but that’s a different topic. The point is… well… the point, I guess, is a question… “If 92% of your viewership is male, why cater to females at all?” or, “Why not do things that affect 92% of your viewership instead of 8%?”. That’s how I was feeling during that silent period right after Kathryn asked her question and the panelists were mentally deciding who was going to address it. :)

One panelist even said that if they were going to do female-oriented content, they would have to make a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SITE! :D This and other comments that escape me right now are what got me thinking about this topic. Is there a difference between “female humor” and “male humor”? Do women (in general) get stuff that’s “funny to women” and men get stuff that’s “funny to men”?

Assuming that’s the case… In this era of niche marketing, there’s no “space” for the combination of “male and female humor”. Doing stuff to attract women will “turn off” male viewers, taking away from “the bottom line”. The question becomes whether attempting to increase the low percentage of female viewers will decrease the number of male viewers to the point that it wasn’t worth it in the first place.

The moderator had the solution… technically… which was to bring in female content creators to make videos specifically geared towards a female audience. However, this fit EXACTLY into the other two theories, which were basically “We’re going to cater to what our demographic is” and “If we’re going to ‘add’ females, we need to make a completely different site”.

On a different topic, yet the same, in a way… I ran into the same issue with my DatingGenius blog. Being a guy, I can blog all day and all night about tricks and tips for “getting girls”. It’s easy to create content for males, because all guys want to know is how to get around the artificial obstacles women throw up which prevent / delay guys from getting laid. It’s not so easy for me to create content for women, because I have to reverse-engineer it. I think to myself “What would *I* do to them?” and then figure out their defense against me and write it. The only other way I get female-oriented material is through actual discussions with my myriad homegirls and selecting common issues that they have, like why guys catcall.

Thinking about this question in terms of my own content, it’s clear to me that if I gave a damn about having female-oriented content and I knew damned well that my mind didn’t generate this stuff on its own, I would need to bring in someone who understands “female comedy” to handle that part of my business for me. This is why it was funny to hear “um, uh, um…” when Kathryn brought up the same topic she always brings up :D , because you would think that if I’VE heard the question a million times, THEY would have heard the question a BILLION times and done something about it by now.

However… Being that internet video is about “the bottom line”, viewership, eyeballs, revenue sharing, CPM, CPC etc etc etc, women may just have to wait until they’re seen as a “market” worth throwing funds at…. haha Wait… I forgot something. :D

Assuming that it’s NOT the case that there’s “male humor” and “female humor”, there should be a crossover. You should be able to make comedy shows by females that males flock to (other than because they think she looks good and don’t give a damn what she’s saying anyway) and comedy shows by males that increase the female presence in your demographic surveys.

The whole idea may be self-fulfilling. We can’t get female numbers up higher than blah blah percent, so why bother catering to them? Meanwhile, not catering to them doesn’t increase your female viewership past those traditional percentages.

I have no idea and totally don’t care what my demos are for DatingGenius. I try to mix it up and have something for tha fellaz AND tha ladiez! Then again, DG isn’t a business. It’s something I do for kicks. If I were doing it for money, haha, I might be in the same boat with the panelists, saying essentially “Our statistics haven’t show that the sector you’re asking about is worth us wasting our production money on, due to lack of ROI”.

So maybe it doesn’t matter whether women are funny or not. Even if they WERE, they’re not going to see any light unless businesses can figure out ways to make money off of them. Seems to me like a void waiting to be filled by women that are willing to create their own content, encode, post, distribute and market it THEMSELVES and take advantage while the currently established sites get caught slippin’.

~Bill

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So I had lunch with Dave Ford the other day, and he asked me how many people read my blog. I answered “eh… Between 200 and 300″. I knew there was something incorrect about my answer, but I didn’t have time to figure out something I had never considered before, so I went with that.

I use several statistics programs/apps/sites to figure out what my traffic is. I’m not sure what the overlap is between them. I decided to base my answer on complete redundancy and just go with the largest numbers I see every day.

It would have been more accurate to say that one of my statistics apps reports that every single day, BillCammack.com receives between 200 and 300 pageviews. That particular app only counts the views it can “see”, though. For instance, if someone reads my site via a feed reader, it won’t register as a page hit, even though the information was served.

This is why “Between 200 and 300″ isn’t a correct response to “how many people read BillCammack.com?” That would be correct if ONLY 200-300 IP addresses were hitting my statistics app during the time period in question.

In fact, when I checked Google Analytics just now, I received this:

According to Google, over the last month, between September 04 and October 04, 2008, my site received visits from 4,646 “Absolute Unique Visitors”. If you divide that by 30 to emulate a month, you end up with 154 “Absolute Unique Visitors” every single day. This seems to imply that 154 people discovered BillCammack.com every day of the last month. That’s not correct either. I can’t say 4,646 people read my site any more than I can say 300 people read my site. So now, we have to figure out what they mean by “Absolute Unique Visitors”.

According to The Official Google Analytics Blog:

Absolute Unique Visitors: This report counts each visitor only once and then classifies the visitor as “First Time” or “Prior Visitor.” The question asked is, “has this visitor visited the website prior to the active (selected) date range?” and the answer is a simple yes or no. If the answer is “yes” the visitor is categorized under “Prior Visitors”; if it is no, the visitor is categorized under “First Time Visitors.” Visitors who have returned are still only counted once.

So I needed to look at New vs Returning visitors:

So, 4,520 visitors arrived at BillCammack.com for the first time in September and 595 visitors had been to my site before September 04, 2008. So, do I actually have 595 readers instead of 300 or 4,646? :D

no.

If I look at “Visitor Loyalty”:

I see that out of my 5,115 total visits for the month, 4,520 of them only visited my site ONE TIME! :D 261 people came back for a second visit during that 30-day span and 88 people came back a third time, etc. If we select the 26-50 bracket and up, 66 people visited my site over 26 times in 30 days, or approximately once a day. I’d like to say a special “Thanks! :D ” to the visitors that made it into the 50+, 100+ and 200+ visit brackets, haha!

So, assuming I were to base my answer to Dave’s question on Google Analytics, I would say that I have a core viewership of 66 people, however, I received 7,589 pageviews from 4,646 absolute unique addresses over the last month, 88% of which only visited my site one time.

The other problem with answering “How many people read your blog?” is that my posts are ‘evergreen’… like this one. I wrote “How To Break Up With Your Girl” back in March, almost 7 months ago, and it gets hits to this day. So even if I were to say that when I write a post, 40 people read it the first day, that doesn’t honestly express how many people read it as they’re searching Google for the answers to their dating dilemmas and end up @ DatingGenius.

It also doesn’t take syndication and reblogging into account. If my posts get picked up on other people’s blogs, like boinkology, there could be an unnatural surge in my pageviews for a particular post.

So, the answer to the question is “I have no idea”. :D Three different statistics apps give me three different sets of numbers. I’d say I have about 80 hardcore returning fans/viewers/readers and I also served about 7,000 one-time site hits last month.

However… That and $2 will get you on the subway.

~Bill