An Objective way to find out how many Bronies there are.

[digit112 89]

Okay, so for a while I've pondered how you'd go about this. Counting the number of bronies in the world is really hard. With people who don't open up about it or don't use the internet (and won't see the polls) Accounting for varying densities of bronies in various places, it's all very complicated. But I've got a practical way to do it. First, and this is the easy part, you need an online poll that asks bronies where they live with decent accuracy. We can account for other variables such as internet usage and population and establish the number of bronies in each country in relation to each other.  For instance, we could say Country A has half as many bronies as Country B, and B has three times as many as Country C. Now, the second part. We do a real-life poll in one of these places (or more, which will be required in practice) And can use that information to find the amounts of bronies everywhere else. So we can poll Country A and learn it has 150, and therefore B has 300 and C has 100. And then just add them up for a total.

 

I really have no reference point for how new, effective, or useful this is. When I came up with it I was pretty surprised at myself. So comments would be helpful, thanks!

[GrimGrimoire 4,973]

 

Polls online are pretty useless when it comes to any sort of census. Not everyone visits the same sites, or often any site at all.... and not everyone bothers with any sort of count. Also people drop in and out of the fandom all the time, new people find it regularly and start watching it, and others get tired of it and quit. Later something catches their eye and they return while others step out. Finally, you have to define what a brony is. Some just casually watch the show, others are creators and love to make additional content whether that is art or music, some some are die-hards that love everything about MLP, some actually don't like FiM and prefer the older generations, and still more don't care about the show much at all, and just like hanging out in the fandom and having OCs and the like. Not all of them identify as bronies, and some find the term distasteful.

The only real way to do a count and get anything close to reliable results is door to door. Good luck with that.

[SugarCoatxMarblePie 701]

http://www.bronystudy.com/id1.html Tho this is closer to a 2013 sorta deal and alot left the fandom since then.

[digit112 89]

8 hours ago, GrimGrimoire said:

The only real way to do a count and get anything close to reliable results is door to door. Good luck with that.

I know that, this idea reduces that down to a more feasible way. You can go door-to-door for just a few hundred people in a few dozen different places and get a really accurate number. Sure the people are coming and going but it's safe to assume the number of bronies in various places and their average age stays just about the same. At least over the time period it would take to do the survey. I know it's difficult but it is the most practical and accurate method I could come up with or find.

http://www.bronystudy.com/id1.html Tho this is closer to a 2013 sorta deal and alot left the fandom since then.

You know? I'm not under the impression that its gotten smaller.

Edited April 30, 2017 by digit112

[SugarCoatxMarblePie 701]

3 hours ago, digit112 said:

You know? I'm not under the impression that its gotten smaller.

Others have been tho, but I wouldn't know as I joined near the end of season 4.

[Once In A Blue Moon 895]

10 hours ago, GrimGrimoire said:

The only real way to do a count and get anything close to reliable results is door to door. Good luck with that.

Door-to-door surveys have their issues as well - I suspect that as a significant proportion of bronies either avoid revealing or actively conceal the fact that they are bronies, so they may well not even admit as much in a door-to-door interview, rendering it a highly unreliable method of sampling the population.

 

11 hours ago, digit112 said:

I really have no reference point for how new, effective, or useful this is. When I came up with it I was pretty surprised at myself. So comments would be helpful, thanks!

I think that sounds like a reasonable approach in terms of theory, but my concern is that the country ratios would introduce quite a bit of error and that the 'accurate poll' might not be terribly accurate, compounding the problem.

My thoughts are that as brony numbers are tricky to measure directly what we should try to measure is signs of their presence. Traffic to forums such as this one, certain purchases (sales of adult-sized MLP clothing, for example), view counts on media aimed at brony audiences (you won't find many eight year old girls watching Dawn Somewhere's MLP content) and so on are all indicators of the population size, so what we would need to do is establish the exact correlation between the indicator and the population*.

If we could study data from other fandoms that would help as well - take Game of Thrones, for example. Viewing figures for the TV series (plus the illegal views) should give us a pretty good idea of the total population. Then we look at, say, the number of Game of Thrones t-shirts sold - from that we can infer the conversion rate of fans to shirt purchases (say, 1 in every 10,000 fans buys a t-shirt) that we can try applying to MLP t-shirts. It's not an exact science, but it's a lot better than most people give it credit for.

 

*Another example, to help explain the method, is using road-kill to estimate a population: a given proportion of a free-roaming animal species are killed by vehicles in a given time period, so if we count the road-kill we can estimate the actual population. And, as the proportion killed should remain the same, we can measure the relative size of the population with very high accuracy (so for example, if road kill drops by 50% we are confident that the animal population has dropped by around 50% even if we don't know exactly how many there are.)