MySpace and Income
September 3rd, 2009 |
The Harvard Business Review recently published the above map in an article attempting to locate MySpace’s centers of activity. The colors represent relative rates of use: red states have 20% or more MySpace logins than we’d expect from their populations of Internet users, and orange states have 10-20% more. Dark blue (20+% less) and light blue (10-20% less) have fewer logins than expected, while green states are more or less consistent with expected rates (+/- 10%).
The author of the article suggests correlations with political affiliation and “media centers,” but I was interested in testing the class division hypothesis, so I pulled the three-year median household income data from the Census:
|
Relative MySpace Use |
N |
Median HH Income |
|
20+% more |
14 |
$45,545.36*** |
|
10-20% more |
5 |
$43,700.20*** |
|
+/- 10% |
14 |
$48,948.64*** |
|
10-20% less |
6 |
$53,213.67 |
|
20+% less |
11 |
$56,935.63*** |
The results were significant (F = 7.18, p < .001), and the post-hoc showed that the dark blue, heavily underrepresented group was responsible: states that have far fewer MySpace logins than expected (20+%) have a significantly higher median household income than states with as many or more logins than expected (green, orange, and red states).
A bit of a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but interesting nonetheless.
The author also reported that three states had over 50% more logins than expected: Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi; these three states have the sixth-lowest, third-lowest, and lowest median household incomes by state, respectively.
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