XBiz Polls: About You

Sometimes a poll seems familiar, and indeed, I try to track industry changes over time, repeating past polls or posing similar questions trying to refine and update my results. As I begin thinking of the new questions that I will be putting to you in the future, I would like to share with you some of the recent results from polls past. Today, we’ll look at questions that concerned you, the reader’s of XBiz:

The first questions that I had concerned the age of our readers; since the comments made in the message board posts, as well as the attitudes they represented, indicated a rather broad range of ages, maturity, and overall experience levels. While the relative youth of our audience was not surprising, the percentage of "kids" (under 21) was. This is a concern to me, as the tone, content, and imagery displayed in some of our more recent board threads (yep, I too am guilty of this) raise a potential liability issue, re: some material that is potentially harmful to minors being displayed in a non age-verified environment.

While there will doubtless be readers of this article commenting that my concerns on this issue are a joke – especially given the nature of our business – I will point out the social commentary that could be made about an industry where a statistically significant percentage of the product’s producers are not legally able to be its consumers. Our foe’s are not entirely unjustified with some of the arguments that they make...

I was also interested in the ‘division of labor’ so to speak, re: how many of our readers were the Chiefs, and how many were the Indians – as well as how many could add "head cook and bottle washer" to the long list of job descriptions that they had:

One of the questions that most intrigued me was what you really felt about what you do, and this is not as easy to quantify as you might expect, so once again, I devised a few "questions by proxy." Consider my earlier comments about "…an industry where a statistically significant percentage of the product’s producers are not legally able to be its consumers." Now consider the fact that we are working in an industry where a statistically significant percentage of the product’s producers are not financially willing to be consumers.

For those of you who are not earning as much as you would like to from your sites, take an old salesman’s advice: "Kid, how the hell do you expect to successfully sell something that you yourself wouldn’t buy?!?"

Lastly, I wanted to know what you all thought about the appropriateness of photographers putting down their cameras, and picking up their models... On a personal note, the last time I did that, I got married, and I haven’t looked back (or around) since. Here’s what the rest of you thought about it:

Should Photographers Date Models?

• Yes! Sometimes: 36%
• Yes! Always!: 32%
• No! Strictly Professional: 22%
• Why? I'm Married: 10%

Obviously, these questions, and the resulting answers, can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways, and it’s also obvious that if I asked some of them more ‘directly’ the answers would be ‘skewed’ which has led me to occasionally discover what I really wanted to know through round about means. My questions are also hampered by the requirement that they (as well as the choices of the required four optional answers) fit on one very short line so as not to upset the formatting of our index page (the biggest limiting factor in what is presented in these polls). Finally, these polls are based upon voluntary responses, and are not a true scientific sampling.

As I develop more questions to put to you, I am always curious about what YOU want to know, so if there is anything that you would like to see covered in a future XBiz Webmaster Poll, please send it to me at stephen@xbiz.com – and read my next installment, where I'll reveal what I learned about your businesses. Good luck ~ Stephen