a largely pointless exercise

a note on language

I (a random fan of Dungeons and Daddies) am Australian; I spell accordingly; I use y’all throughout because English hasn't had an agreed-upon gender neutral second-person plural pronoun since 'you' stopped doing that job and muscled in on thou's turf (thanks FRENCH), and I didn't think y'all would be familiar with the Aussie variant 'youse'.All that to say:
a) stop messaging me about spelling, you dorks, and
b) if you think pronouns can't evolve you are simply wrong, and I invite you to go suck somewhere else.Seriously though: this survey asks about sex and gender, and I've tried to retain respondants' self-identification as much as possible. I am not trans OR a data anylst, but I am sincerely trying not to be a dickhead; please let me know if I am.Thank you, I love you, you’re so pretty!

For reference, the 12 survey questions

Attentive readers will notice a marked decline in quality betwen the first section of questions ('The Basics') and the rest, which are very dumb. Please bear this in mind as you review the results presented elsewhere on this site.

The basics

- How old are you? Multiple choice
- Where do you live? Write-in response
- how did you hear about the podcast? if word-of-mouth, was it via a specifically gaming or TTRPG community? were you trawling for BDSM podcasts and thought it was an exceptionally slow burn? Originally multiple choice, changed to write-in after iniital feedback
- Roughly when did you start listening? Multiple choice

- How do you identify your gender? Selection of 'male', 'female', 'nb or fluid', 'just a lil guy, you know?' or write-in
- **How do you identify your sexuality? **Selection of "I love them ladies", "I love them gentlemen", "I love a range of ladies, gentlemen, and points in between", "I certainly enjoy my friendship with them ladies and gentlemen", "I have no interest in romance, but I would like to be held" and write-in

Do you game, bro?

- do you play dnd? Selection of "...not really, no", "I listen to or watch actual-play shows but haven't played", "Oh man, I'm in scheduling hell for three campaigns right now, but I had SUCH a cool character idea-" and "Oh, actully I prefer TTRPGS with non-combat-oriented mechanics and the smoother statisical curve of 3d6 over 1d20 because I'm BETTER THAN YOU"
- do you play video games? Selection of "...not really, no", "Sure, I love a round of shooty-bangbang when I visit my friend with [new console]", "I AM the friend with [new console]; sometimes I have Too Many Thoughts about graphics cards" and "uh, infantile labels like 'shooty-bangbang' undermine the artistic decisions required to orchestrate tension and release within combat mechanics, and create a false dichotamy that stunts video games as a medium because I'M BETTER THAN YOU"

How much of a fan are you, tho?

- hey, did you hear Anthony Burch started waxing his butthole? Selection of "Sure did, bud" and "...Sure didn't until just now, bud"
- do you think he kept up maintenance over the holiday, and if not do you think the resulting itchiness will mean a more emotionally devastating start to Season 2? Selection of "A smooth man is a happy man, and I know a smooth man when hear one!" and "Getting a TPK could be a Total Party Kill... or it could mean That's (a) Prickly Keister. Get ready."
- are you uncomfortable with how parasocial this survey has become ? Selection of "No, this is fine", "Totally normal" and "I don't give a para-fuck, these people are my best friends"
- who is your favourite, and why is it Beth May? Write-in

tl;dr:

- 2,000 respondants to this survey
- Roughly halvsies men/not men
- Roughly halvsies queer/not queer
- 155 people found out via this survey that Anothony waxes his butthole

Audience basics

Places with one reported listener include the Bailiwick of Jersey, the Isle of Man, Latvia, Turkey and Jersusalem.At the other end of the spectrum, the 10 countries with the biggest audience are: the US (1,352), Canada (155), UK (143), Australia (61), the Netherlands (31), Germany (23), New Zealand (18), Denmark (17), Ireland (16) and Sweden (10).

Are we all adults? No? GASP!

Gender? I hardly know er!*

*haaaahahahahahaha

finding the pod

- The vast majority of all age-groups found the pod through TTRPG-related sources, particularly: Spotify recommendations, various subreddits, NADDPOD, TAZ and word of mouth from other players.- The 25-36 group was most likely to already be following a cast member from Story Break, HAWP, Rocket Jump or another project (see chart below for a rough distribution).- Exactly 69 people total cited "comedy" in how they found the podcast (nice)

- One young listener found the pod through her dad, and an older listener started because of her daughter. Isn't that sweet? I think that's sweet. (Those respondants live on different continents, so I don't think I'm counting one heavily invested family twice.)- The older you are, the more likely you are to abbreviate dungeons and dragons with '&' rather than 'n', which proves nothing but is interesting.

But... are we even gamers, bro?

Some conclusions

- If you want to start a podcast in the year of our lord 2022 you have simply got to have an eye-catching name, a concise premise, and preferably one recognisable person attached. Anything less and you're actually just masturbating into a microphone (which has its own, far more lucrative, marketplace).- Multiple recommendations or name recognition (especially of Freddie) were important to get people over the line for the first listen. On the other hand, a suprising number of people report being 'trapped' into listening during some kind of road-trip scenario. NB: this survey has an obvious bias towards successful examples of this strategy.- Younger listeners were way more likely than any other group to be introduced by fan creations on tiktok and tumblr, including animatics, lip-syncs or cosplay. For other groups, guest spots on other podcasts were more likely to be influential.- Y'all are lucky so many TAZ fans had feelings about that one arc, because that came up a lot. Shoutout r/tazcirclejerk, I guess.

Good reasons to listen

- Beth, do you remember meeting a 30-something dude in the vicinity of Van nuys California, some time before October 2019? Turns out he actually started listening to the show ¯\(ツ)/¯- Shoutout to a high-school drama teacher in the Southern US, this is a pretty fuckin raunchy podcast to recommend to your students. That's either cool or extremely not cool, hard to say at this point.- On the other hand, an actual shoutout to the UK teacher who started listening after a student recommended it, that's legitimately very cool.- "I was working in a cannabis dispensary, and one of my favorite patients had an enamel pin with the title on it."- "Went out for a one night stand with this chick and she had a dungeons and daddies shirt on her dresser. Looked it up and started the podcast on the way home."- "I saw a Beth May tweet once."