Brony population

[PlNKlE PIE 363]

Actually, we're only 10 or so.

But we're so into it that we like to make thousands of different accounts and make tons of fan stuff just to pretend that we're a big community.

 

Yeah, we're just a small group of people trying to troll the world in the greatest trollfest coltkind has ever seen.

[Spock 91]

IT'S OVER 9000!!! It had to happen.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Bon Bon

[RockinRarity 1,605]

Heh, I find this statistic amusing.

 

Edited January 11, 2012 by RockinRarity

[Espionage 113]

Equestria Daily got 100 million hits this morning. It's already 400,000 hits over the 100 million mark in less than a span of 24 hours.

[cntbelevimaBrony 43]

Equestria Daily got 100 million hits this morning. It's already 400,000 hits over the 100 million mark in less than a span of 24 hours.

 

Lauren Faust is going to be worth more money than Bill Gates when its all said and done

[Saiko 67]

There are loads of us. A fact I noticed yesterday: I took part in a competition where teams of four entered, when I looked at the ranking, at least 5 of 175 teams had names in some way connected to MLP: there were "Cutie Mark Crusaders", "Bronies", "Rainbow Dash Fanclub" and some others. It gives us pretty high percent of bronies, hmm? And if it's this high in my small country filled by bigots and "manly males", there must be much more bronies in USA and other places

[Jokuc 8,172]

Lauren Faust is going to be worth more money than Bill Gates when its all said and done

 

Hahahah

[Espionage 113]

Lauren Faust is going to be worth more money than Bill Gates when its all said and done

 

Lauren Faust is the goddess of cartoons. Everything she has a part in always becomes 20% cooler.

[Radiance64 7,051]

Perhaps there are trillions of bronies, like on other planets- that would be epic.

[lugobu 3]

BronyNet has ~22,000 members, Ponysquare ~10,000.

 

According to this http://siteanalytics.compete.com/equestriadaily.com/?metric=uv, Equestria daily has ~86,000 unique visitors per month.

 

We could think about many pony communities coexisting, but my guess is there is overlapping. For this reason my guess the size of the brony community in 2012 is ~50,000. Where brony is someone who participates in a website related to FIM.

 

But if brony is someone who has watched FIM and likes it, the number could be higher. I think for everybrony there are 10 persons who watches and likes the show in the same demographic. So ~500,000.

[Thewookie Wooker 64]

I would guess anywhere from 100,000 to 1.25 million.

 

Perhaps there are trillions of bronies, like on other planets- that would be epic.

 

That is an interesting idea, maybe it broadcasts to other planets including the MLP world where the ponies themselves are bronies

 

I remember reading somewhere once that all TV shows/ movies/books are all just other planets/galaxies

[LMW-YBC 102]

I'd guess around 1.5 million. MLP is such a phenomenon on the Internet and it deserves all the popularity it can get!

 

Where I live (My town and school, not my whole country) there is about 12 bronies. About 50 pending- Yeah, I don't really know much about figures, but that's my guess

[LightRaider 148]

Well at my school there's about 4-6, but there could be mOre

[Doc Blacksmith 0]

I just hope if they make a MLP movie they don't forget how much the brony population has helped their brand and exposure. I mean, I'd pay to see it and probably be first in line.

[Princes Cadance 345]

On kids react like 3 out of like 10 so 1/3 of the population?

[Inactive01 5,298]

I'm the only brony in my university, and there's at least 1000 there...

 

You guys are lucky to have bronies in your community. I wish there were more where I am. However, I did see some kids colour Princess Celestia and some toys on Walmart...

Edited February 24, 2012 by Derpity Derp

[FedoraMemes 582]

OVER 9000!

 

But seriously, probably over a million. Most views on the MLP youtube videos (uploaded by Hasbro) are nearly all bronies. Just about everyone who liked the Facebook page was a brony, with the exception of the parents and the little kids who shouldn't have Facebook. Hell, bronies are being made everyday! I turned my friend into a brony, which turned another friend into a brony.

[SBaby 660]

Pony videos get views in the millions. So if you consider that at least half of the viewers become bronies, coupled with the ratings of FIM on the Hub (currently its most popular cartoon, and one of the most popular cartoons in its time slot), probably in the millions.

[/mlp/ 106]

ITS OVER 9000!!!!!! !!!!!!! !!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Edited February 24, 2012 by Corrupt

[Mare in the Moon 173]

Even before reading this, I imagined there were Bronies in at least the Ten-Thousands. Its not unbelievable. Now I am believing the Hundred Thousands.

 

I do wish there were more Bronies in my community though. I am trying to spread it to my friends without pushing it on them. I got one to agree to watch it, but a couple think I am crazy for even asking them.

[Comet Tail 808]

We're getting closer every day to becoming a global majority.

The world shall soon be ours brothers!

I mean uuh, sunshine and rainbows and happiness.

 

The two are the same! This is the bronified world, comrade:

(I've posted this video 4 times on these forums now XD )

 

Heh, I find this statistic amusing.

 

 

Is that a real statistic of bronies!?

I hope not. Now I'm scared to get married one day XD (loljk. Mostly.)

 

 

 

-

A lot of people keep putting actual numbers, but I think a much more accurate number will come from trying to get an actual sense of proportions - those numbers give you the most active members, people who use EQD (I'm a big brony but for some reason I never really go there much...), take a certain poll, have a DA, etc, will return tiny numbers compared to the actual number of bronies.

 

In other words, instead of trying to get hard numbers from site hits, faves, etc., a much better idea will be doing something like this:

 

There are loads of us. A fact I noticed yesterday: I took part in a competition where teams of four entered, when I looked at the ranking, at least 5 of 175 teams had names in some way connected to MLP: there were "Cutie Mark Crusaders", "Bronies", "Rainbow Dash Fanclub" and some others. It gives us pretty high percent of bronies, hmm? And if it's this high in my small country filled by bigots and "manly males", there must be much more bronies in USA and other places

 

5/175 -> teams of four. Were the teams randomly assigned, etc, or what? Because that team name would only come about if all four were bronies, or if three were bronies and the fourth wasn't opposed to the team name, or the very unlikely case that two are bronies and the other two don't oppose a brony name enough to stop it from being used. Not to mention, the vast, vast majority of bronies I think are closet bronies, so they wouldn't even say anything. It could be possible there were even 3/4 or 4/4 brony teams that didn't even know their teammates were bronies, and never put forth the brony name.5/175 -> teams of four. Were the teams randomly assigned, etc, or what? Because that team name would only come about if all four were bronies, or if three were bronies and the fourth wasn't opposed to the team name, or the very unlikely case that two are bronies and the other two don't oppose a brony name enough to stop it from being used. Not to mention, the vast, vast majority of bronies I think are closet bronies, so they wouldn't even say anything. It could be possible there were even 3/4 or 4/4 brony teams that didn't even know their teammates were bronies, and never put forth the brony team name.

 

I'd guess around 1.5 million. MLP is such a phenomenon on the Internet and it deserves all the popularity it can get!

 

Where I live (My town and school, not my whole country) there is about 12 bronies. About 50 pending- Yeah, I don't really know much about figures, but that's my guess

 

12 and 50 pending? Sheesh, it really sounds like we are taking over the world Xp. _{What, you think I'm kidding?}

 

Are you and those 12 you know open about your bronydome, and how many people in total do you know? Maybe that'll help us get a better proportion idea.

 

On kids react like 3 out of like 10 so 1/3 of the population?

 

Do we really see all the reactions, or do they show more kids and we only see the ones they thought were interesting enough to publish?

 

I think there were 12 or 13, I'll assume 12... So that's 1/4 the adolescent population. On top of that, I think a few others felt something good about it, almost all of them, but immediately rejected it for a number of reasons (See: "Who Do Haters Hate?" for some more detail on that), conscious and subconscious.

 

Now we need to consider, of the 12, did they really represent random members of the adolescent population? Probably not. It depends on how "Teens React" selects their teens. Also, on the TV-set situation, in that particular environment (colorful room, they feel safe so they aren't threatened by the show, etc.) and situation (what's your opinion? The purpose you're here for is to react to this show. Give us a reaction.), I think is causing a lot more bronies than would "naturally" occur. Not to mention, these kids are relaxed, they're in the mindset of objectively analyzing these shows for a reaction, so some of them, their "guard" is probably down, so to speak, so they're more likely to admit to themselves that they like it, too. This is probably the best possible situation for getting people to like MLP.

 

But, I don't hesitate to say, that there might be as much as 15 million bronies worldwide, probably a minimum of 3 million. And a potential of as much as 80 or 90 million. These are just really rough guesses, but they do come from some good guessing.

 

And, there has to be a lot, I mean, at a local FYE store I saw two brony shirts on sale, at a video store. (shirt section had maybe 20 shirts) and I live in a small town (pop. 37,000 over 37 sq. mi. ). So whoever was making the business decisions, decided they could make money from selling brony shirts, that only open bronies would ever buy, in a small town. These people are smart, otherwise they wouldn't be in business. So there must be a lot more bronies than we think!

 

I'm the only brony in my university, and there's at least 1000 there...

 

You guys are lucky to have bronies in your community. I wish there were more where I am. However, I did see some kids colour Princess Celestia and some toys on Walmart...

 

I doubt that. Keep a sharp eye out, look on the internet, etc. etc., I seriously doubt you're the only one there. If you're a closet brony, you might consider coming out, then you'd probably get a lot of other secret bronies coming out after you, since they're in the same situation. It's a dangerous move, though, so it's your call.

 

 

From what I can gather, open bronies are like the flu. There's a lot of potential that builds up in certain areas (secret bronies), then all of a sudden, with a single infection (one open brony), a lot more infections happen (bronies come out and make/join groups).

 

Because of this, you get "pockets" that form, where groups exist, where bronies aren't really taboo, and outside of these pockets, however, the world seems desolate of bronies, because they're secret bronies. But where these groups exist, they're not afraid to join one, because then they're not alone.

 

One example is my cousin. She lives two thousand miles away, but she says she's really popular at her school. Apparently, some kids opened up about MLP, and became social outcasts (which will happen if you do it wrong, especially under-assertively...). She supported them, and all of a sudden, it became popular to like MLP. I somewhat question the validity of the story, but at least it's foundations ring true.

 

 

OVER 9000!

 

But seriously, probably over a million. Most views on the MLP youtube videos (uploaded by Hasbro) are nearly all bronies. Just about everyone who liked the Facebook page was a brony, with the exception of the parents and the little kids who shouldn't have Facebook. Hell, bronies are being made everyday! I turned my friend into a brony, which turned another friend into a brony.

 

Even before reading this, I imagined there were Bronies in at least the Ten-Thousands. Its not unbelievable. Now I am believing the Hundred Thousands.

 

I do wish there were more Bronies in my community though. I am trying to spread it to my friends without pushing it on them. I got one to agree to watch it, but a couple think I am crazy for even asking them.

 

Oh, yes, the viral nature of bronydome at it's best XD.

 

I would guess anywhere from 100,000 to 1.25 million.

 

 

 

That is an interesting idea, maybe it broadcasts to other planets including the MLP world where the ponies themselves are bronies

 

I remember reading somewhere once that all TV shows/ movies/books are all just other planets/galaxies

 

The idea comes from this: If the universe is infinite, then anything with any chance of happening at all, is happening somewhere.

[NewCalamity 3,454]

So many...

 

But, what would the Gender percentage be?

 

Last I checked it was 84% Male and 16% Female!

[Inactive01 5,298]

 

The two are the same! This is the bronified world, comrade:

(I've posted this video 4 times on these forums now XD )

 

 

 

Is that a real statistic of bronies!?

I hope not. Now I'm scared to get married one day XD (loljk. Mostly.)

 

 

 

-

A lot of people keep putting actual numbers, but I think a much more accurate number will come from trying to get an actual sense of proportions - those numbers give you the most active members, people who use EQD (I'm a big brony but for some reason I never really go there much...), take a certain poll, have a DA, etc, will return tiny numbers compared to the actual number of bronies.

 

In other words, instead of trying to get hard numbers from site hits, faves, etc., a much better idea will be doing something like this:

 

 

 

5/175 -> teams of four. Were the teams randomly assigned, etc, or what? Because that team name would only come about if all four were bronies, or if three were bronies and the fourth wasn't opposed to the team name, or the very unlikely case that two are bronies and the other two don't oppose a brony name enough to stop it from being used. Not to mention, the vast, vast majority of bronies I think are closet bronies, so they wouldn't even say anything. It could be possible there were even 3/4 or 4/4 brony teams that didn't even know their teammates were bronies, and never put forth the brony name.5/175 -> teams of four. Were the teams randomly assigned, etc, or what? Because that team name would only come about if all four were bronies, or if three were bronies and the fourth wasn't opposed to the team name, or the very unlikely case that two are bronies and the other two don't oppose a brony name enough to stop it from being used. Not to mention, the vast, vast majority of bronies I think are closet bronies, so they wouldn't even say anything. It could be possible there were even 3/4 or 4/4 brony teams that didn't even know their teammates were bronies, and never put forth the brony team name.

 

 

 

12 and 50 pending? Sheesh, it really sounds like we are taking over the world Xp. _{What, you think I'm kidding?}

 

Are you and those 12 you know open about your bronydome, and how many people in total do you know? Maybe that'll help us get a better proportion idea.

 

 

 

Do we really see all the reactions, or do they show more kids and we only see the ones they thought were interesting enough to publish?

 

I think there were 12 or 13, I'll assume 12... So that's 1/4 the adolescent population. On top of that, I think a few others felt something good about it, almost all of them, but immediately rejected it for a number of reasons (See: "Who Do Haters Hate?" for some more detail on that), conscious and subconscious.

 

Now we need to consider, of the 12, did they really represent random members of the adolescent population? Probably not. It depends on how "Teens React" selects their teens. Also, on the TV-set situation, in that particular environment (colorful room, they feel safe so they aren't threatened by the show, etc.) and situation (what's your opinion? The purpose you're here for is to react to this show. Give us a reaction.), I think is causing a lot more bronies than would "naturally" occur. Not to mention, these kids are relaxed, they're in the mindset of objectively analyzing these shows for a reaction, so some of them, their "guard" is probably down, so to speak, so they're more likely to admit to themselves that they like it, too. This is probably the best possible situation for getting people to like MLP.

 

But, I don't hesitate to say, that there might be as much as 15 million bronies worldwide, probably a minimum of 3 million. And a potential of as much as 80 or 90 million. These are just really rough guesses, but they do come from some good guessing.

 

And, there has to be a lot, I mean, at a local FYE store I saw two brony shirts on sale, at a video store. (shirt section had maybe 20 shirts) and I live in a small town (pop. 37,000 over 37 sq. mi. ). So whoever was making the business decisions, decided they could make money from selling brony shirts, that only open bronies would ever buy, in a small town. These people are smart, otherwise they wouldn't be in business. So there must be a lot more bronies than we think!

 

 

 

I doubt that. Keep a sharp eye out, look on the internet, etc. etc., I seriously doubt you're the only one there. If you're a closet brony, you might consider coming out, then you'd probably get a lot of other secret bronies coming out after you, since they're in the same situation. It's a dangerous move, though, so it's your call.

 

 

From what I can gather, open bronies are like the flu. There's a lot of potential that builds up in certain areas (secret bronies), then all of a sudden, with a single infection (one open brony), a lot more infections happen (bronies come out and make/join groups).

 

Because of this, you get "pockets" that form, where groups exist, where bronies aren't really taboo, and outside of these pockets, however, the world seems desolate of bronies, because they're secret bronies. But where these groups exist, they're not afraid to join one, because then they're not alone.

 

One example is my cousin. She lives two thousand miles away, but she says she's really popular at her school. Apparently, some kids opened up about MLP, and became social outcasts (which will happen if you do it wrong, especially under-assertively...). She supported them, and all of a sudden, it became popular to like MLP. I somewhat question the validity of the story, but at least it's foundations ring true.

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, yes, the viral nature of bronydome at it's best XD.

 

 

 

The idea comes from this: If the universe is infinite, then anything with any chance of happening at all, is happening somewhere.

 

Sadly, I already opened up about it and only one person decided to appreciate the show. Everyone else I showed it to just shunned it.

[I used to be a stranger 7,989]

My estimates:

 

600,000 bronies, participant internet self-acclaim or proclaim

100,000 My Little Pony fans who predate the show's interest

250,000 casual MLP interest who do not seriously concern themselves with the fandom or other related interests

150,000 very serious Bronies who continuously produce fan-works

10,000 very serious Bronies who continuously produce high-quality fan-works

100,000 ancilliary MLP interest persons

150,000-400,000 people who disingenuously or are otherwise somewhat intruiged by MLP, Closet Bronies or other members of the fandom who ensure what or who they are is very under-known.

 

Fandom assumed to be within the perview of "Teenagers who frequent the internet who are interested in My Little Pony" is within the realm of 1.5 million, mostly American males under the age of 25. Genuine "Bronies" is probably equal to half that.

 

Also within this estimate,

 

3,000,000 children who enjoy My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic; the saturday morning cartoon as regular television-watching audience.

700,000 parents who enjoy MLP:FiM as a direct consequence of their children's interest

Edited February 25, 2012 by Blue

[Key Gear 6,662]

Lots of people have already replied to this topic, but I think that this piece that I posted on another pony site a few weeks ago might still be able to contribute. I have seen many people using the compete.com number, and I talk about some of the shortcomings with Compete in here. I'll try to update this a bit though to make it less ridiculous...

 

Ok, I know that this is super long, but there is really no other way for me to do this. Please skip to the end of this if you just want some kind of number estimate for the population of bronies. The section is labeled.

 

I discovered the show before I knew about bronies. I initially found out about the brony community when I was trying to find Rainbow Dash wallpaper for my computer. Since I cam from a statistics background, the first thing that I tried to do was to figure out how many bronies are out there.

 

Using Compete's Numbers

 

Like many people in this thread, I started with the numbers from compete.com. Here are some compete.com numbers for a couple of the central sites:

 

http://siteanalytics...striadaily.com/

 

http://siteanalytics.../mlp.wikia.com/

 

http://siteanalytics...s.memebase.com/

 

(Compete.com is down right now, but it should be back within a few hours. I really wish I had pasted in the numbers I had.)

 

The Problems with The Numbers

 

These are big numbers, but there are actually a few problems with these numbers.

 

The first problem with the compete.com numbers is that they are only estimates. These are not the accurate number of unique visitors to each website. Compete gets these estimates by monitoring the online behavior of a couple million *US-only* internet users. So these estimates totally exclude the rest of the world.

 

The second problem with compete's numbers is that they only estimate unique visitors. Unique visitors is a fuzzy concept to estimate because it is actually counting "unique" IP addresses. There are a few problems with this. IP addresses only loosely correlate with the number of visitors that a website gets.

 

Users connecting to the Internet from college or high school are typically only represented by one IP address or no more than a handful. A family of bronies would also only count as one IP address.

 

Since we are looking at the brony community, this is especially important. Most bronies are still in high school or college. This means that they are likely to connect to these sites from some type of campus or a home (with potentially more than one brony). This suggests that Compete.com may be dramatically underestimating the population of bronies on the Internet.

 

One thing to think about when you are estimating the number of bronies is that Equestria Daily gets about 500,000 page views per day. I doubt that kind of traffic could be generated by only 80,000 individuals.

 

We can look at some other things when trying to estimate the population of bronies as well.

 

Youtube Videos

 

Youtube video hits is another avenue to trying to estimate the population of bronies. Quite a few of the popular videos on youtube have several hundred thousand or even over a million views (links excluded because I don't want them to embed):

 

Flutterwonder ~= 500,000

 

Equestria Girls ~= 1.3 million

 

Rainbow Dash (You're Gonna go far kid) ~= 2 million

 

Of course, you can watch youtube videos more than once, but still, these kind of large numbers suggest that the brony community that is active online is pretty large.

 

Estimating the Population

 

Using all of this information, we can try to come up with a very rough estimate for the total brony population.

 

Outside of the U.S. Friendship is magic has some popularity in Europe and other parts of the world. To be conservative, we will just look at Europe.

 

We can make the assumption that the percentage of European internet users that are bronies is similar to the percentage of the American internet population. This means that we can multiply the Compete estimates by 2.6 to (roughly) include the European bronies. ([European internet users + us internet users] / us internet users. Data from Wolfram Alpha.)

 

This gives us a number of between roughly 200,000 to 500,000 unique visitors depending on the amount of overlap of users that visit more than one of the 3 major sites I linked above. As I mentioned earlier though, unique visitors is probably an underestimate of the actual number of bronies.

 

I have read in a few places that the ratio of actual users to unique visitors is between 1.3 and 1.7. (Counted by counting site cookies or examining browser differences.) If we make this slight correction, then we can adjust our population estimate range to 260,000 on the low end and to 850,000 on the high end.

 

The 260,000 to 850,000 range is probably a safe estimate for the brony population. While there may be some overlap between the visitors of the major fan sites, I think that the upper end of that range is probably more likely. My reason for thinking that is that bronies tend to be much younger than the overall population, and therefore they are more likely to share an ip address but only be counted as a single "unique visitor".

 

More Stuff to Think About

 

Of course, the parents that watch this show with their children and buy their kids toys is probably a little larger than the actual brony community.

 

And, the "silent" bronies that watch the show but rarely or never visit the fansites could easily be 2 or 3 times the number of *active* bronies. Just thinking about myself, if I had never went looking for wallpaper, then I may have never have discovered the community.

 

Of course, it is also important to keep in mind that the number of bronies out there in the wild is actually increasing as time goes on. Just take a look at this:

 

http://www.google.co...date=all&sort=0

 

http://www.google.co...date=all&sort=0

 

Google trend charts give you an idea of the "trending line" in the number of people that are actively searching for a topic. Just look at that run up in popularity for the show and the similar run up in popularity for the term "brony" which didn't even exist before 2010.

 

On Demographics

 

Last I checked it was 84% Male and 16% Female!

 

Well, you can get demographics estimates for the major sites from Alexa.com. (Only the information for the major sites is accurate, because Alexa needs a *lot* of data to make their estimates.) I think that EQD is basically the core of the fanbase at this point, so I will link to its profile.

 

http://www.alexa.com...estriadaily.com

 

To get the demographic info, just click a link and then click the audience tab. It turns out that there are slightly more females than males.

 

I know that males tend to be dramatically overrepresented in polls, but maybe the reason for this is that they are, for whatever reason, more likely to want to answer brony polls?

 

Edit: Ummmmm..... Mods? Please don't ban me for getting a little carried away here......

Edited February 25, 2012 by HAL 9000